larm.

"Perhaps," replied Benjamin, "we had better go right to the Waldron's
garrison, since it is so near. I see lights there."

The party, filled with fear, hastened to the house suggested and knocked
at the outer gate.

"Let us in!" they pleaded. No answer, however, came from the home within.
Benjamin then climbed the wall and looked over the top. To his horror, he
saw an Indian, armed with a gun, standing in the open doorway of the
house. Benjamin had not been seen, and the confusion within had drowned
the cries outside. Jumping down, he started his party with utmost speed
to their own garrison house. They had not gone far, before, to his
dismay, he realized that his mother was not with them.

[Illustration]

He returned to the scene of their peril to find his mother, exhausted by
fright, still at the gate. She was lying there unable to move.

"Go," she implored him in a whisper, "and help the others to safety! I
will come as soon as my strength returns." At that moment a cry of fear
from the others, and his mother's last urgent appeal drove Benjamin to
their rescue while his brave mother was left to her fate.

Recovering a little, Mrs. Heard crept to some protecting bushes where she
lay until daylight, when the gate opened, and an Indian with a pistol
approached her. He paused and looked at her very hard. Silently he left
but returned immediately, for another keen look. This time, his grim
savage face still unmoved, he grunted--

"Good squaw kept Indian boy safe! Indian no forget!" Then he ran yelling
to the house, with some word for his friends who seemed to be there in
numbers.

Soon after the Waldron house burst into flames. Not until the house had
burned to the ground, and the Indians had gone, could Mrs. Heard gather
strength enough to move. She feared the same sad end for her own home,
but, to her surprise, she found it standing unharmed. Surely she had
received her blessing for the bowl of broth and aid to the Indian lad,
for her family and the friends, who had succeeded in reaching the house,
reported that they had been free from attack through the horrors of that
night, which were long remembered by the people of Dover.

THOMAS TOOGOOD OUTWITS AN INDIAN

An Incident of 1690.

"There, you clumsy thing, you've stepped in the cat's saucer and spilled
the milk. Be gone from here," and the crabbed old aunt, who kept house
for the Toogoods, switched her broom after Tom as he moved good-natu