ten, then eleven, "I am going
to fasten up the house."

"Do you hear them?" he asked, without emotion, but as one who deferred to
the finer senses of women.

She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.

He looked at the door that was shrunken and warped from the heat till it
barely held together, and there was no measure to the tenderness he put
into:

"Oh, you poor little fool, do you think you could keep them out by
fastening that?"

"Jim, I must," and her voice broke. "They may think you are not here, that
it's only me and the children, and that's why the house is fastened." She
got up and began to move about as though her thoughts scourged her to
action, even if futile. He shook the ashes from his pipe.

"Do anything you blame please," he said, more by way of humoring her than
from faith in her stratagem. He felt strong enough to face his destiny, to
meet it in a way worthy of his mother's people.

Alida seemed under a spell in her preparations for the night. Each thing
she did as she had done it in her dream the night before; it was as if she
were constrained by a power greater than her will to fulfil a sinister
prophecy. Yet now and then she would stop and wonder if she might not
break the spell by doing things differently from the way she had dreamed
them. Her hand grasped the knob of the door uncertainly, and she swung it
to and fro on its creaking hinges, while her mind seemed likewise to sway
hither and thither. Should she fasten the door and push the bureau against
it, as it had been in the dream, or should she leave door and windows
gaping wide for them? And then, as one who walks and does familiar things
in sleep, she shut the door and turned the key. Jim smiled at her, but she
could no longer look at him. One of the children wailed fretfully from the
room beyond. Sleep had become a scourge in the stifling heat. One by one
she lowered the windows and nailed them down; then she dragged the brown
bureau against the door, took the brace of six-shooters from the wall, and
sat down with Jim to wait.

"What are you going to do with them toys?" he asked, as he saw her examine
the chambers of one of the six-shooters.

"You ain't going to let yourself be caught like a rat in a hole, are you?"
she reproached him.

"'Ain't we agreed that it's best to keep onpleasant family matters from
the kids?" He smiled at her bravely. "The remembrance of what we're
anticipatin' ain't going to help young Jim to