“Fly, father!” cried Phebe.  “They won’t hurt us;” but before the bewildered man could think what to do, the door flew open from the pressure of half a dozen wild-looking desperadoes, and he was powerless in their grasp.  They evidently designed murder, but not a quick and merciful “taking off”; they first heaped upon their victim the vilest epithets, seeking in their thirst for revenge to inflict all the terrors of death in anticipation.  The good man, however, now face to face with his fate, grew calm and resigned.  Exasperated by his courage, they began to cut and torture him with their swords and knives.  Phebe rushed forward to interpose her little form between her father and the ruffians, and was dashed, half stunned, into a corner of the room.  Even for the sake of his sick wife, the brave farmer could not refrain from uttering groans of anguish which brought the poor woman with faltering steps into his presence.  After one glance at the awful scene she sank, half fainting, on a settee near the door.

When the desire for plunder got the better of their fiendish cruelty, one of the gang threw a noosed rope over Mr. Reynolds’s head, and then they hanged him to the trammel or iron hook in the great chimney.

“You can’t smoke us out this time,” they shouted.  “You’ve now got to settle with the avengers of Claudius Smith; and you and some others will find us ugly customers to settle with.”

They then rushed off to rob the house, for the farmer was reputed to have not a little money in his strong box.  The moment they were gone Phebe seized a knife and cut her father down.  Terror and excitement gave her almost supernatural strength, and with the aid of the boy in her father’s service she got the poor man on a bed which he had occupied during his wife’s illness.  Her reviving mother was beginning to direct her movements when the ruffians again entered; and furious with rage, they again seized and hanged her father, while one, more brutal than the others, whipped the poor child with a heavy rope until he thought she was disabled.  The girl at first cowered and shivered under the blows, and then sank as if lifeless on the floor.  But the moment she was left to herself she darted forward and once more cut her father down.  The robbers then flew upon the prostrate man and cut and stabbed him until they supposed he was dead.  Toward his family they meditated a more terrible and devilish cruelty.  After sacking the house and taking all the plunder they could carry, they relieved the horror-stricken wife and crying, shrieking children of their presence.  Their further action, however, soon inspired Phebe with a new and more awful fear, for she found that they had fastened the doors on the outside and were building a fire against one of them.