He understood the look.

"We are pursued.

Them wolves howlin' are the Iroquois.

What do you reckon we're goin' to do, Henry ?" "Fight!" replied the youth, with fierce energy.

"Beat 'em off!" "How ?" Henry circled the little oasis with the eye of a general, and his plan came.
"You'll stand here, where the earth gives a footing," he said, "you, Solomon Hyde, as brave a man as I ever saw, and with you will be Paul Cotter, Tom Ross, Jim Hart, and Henry Ware, old friends of yours.
Carpenter will at once lead the women and children on ahead, and perhaps they will not hear the battle that is going to be fought here." A smile of approval, slow, but deep and comprehensive, stole over the face of Solomon Hyde, surnamed, wholly without fitness, the shiftless one.