rst of cheering.

But I hardly seemed to hear it, as I was relieved by willing hands from
my share in the burden, and I only recollected then finding myself
kneeling beside a blanket under the rough canvas of our extemporised
tent, waiting until the surgeon had ended, when I panted forth--

"Is--is he very bad?"

"Very, my lad," said the surgeon as he rose, "but not bad enough for you
to look like that. Come, cheer up; I won't let him die. We can't spare
a man like your father."

CHAPTER FORTY SIX.

Everybody considered it was all over then, as we stood regularly at bay
behind our palisades and barricades of boxes, cases, and furniture with
which the women and children were surrounded, watching the flames of the
great block-house rising higher and higher in the still night air, in a
way that to me was awful.

So there we were waiting for the final onslaught, gloomy, weary, and
dispirited. The men were chilled, many of them, with the water, and
worn out by their efforts, and as I went round from group to group
silently, in search of some one I knew to talk to, I could not help
seeing that they were beaten, and thinking that the Indians would have
an easy task now when they came.

"It's very horrible," I thought; and I went over the past, and dwelt
upon the numbers that we must have killed. I knew that there would be
no mercy; that the men would all be butchered, and the women and
children, if they escaped that fate, would be carried off into a
horrible captivity.

Pomp seemed to have disappeared, for though I came upon group after
group of black faces whose owners sat about in a stolid indifferent way,
as if the affair did not concern them, and they were resting until
called upon to work once more, I did not see our boy.

I could not see Colonel Preston, and Morgan had gone away from my side
on being summoned by one of the men.

There were plenty of our people about, but all the same I seemed to be
alone, and I was wandering along in the fitful glare of the fire, when I
saw at last a group of men standing together by a pile of something wet
and glistening, over which one man was scattering with his hand some
water from a bucket as if to keep the surface wet, and in this man I
recognised Morgan.

"What's he doing?" I asked myself; and it was some few moments before I
could grasp the truth, and then in a shrinking manner, with sensations
similar to those I had felt when I was going into the burning