His head was bare, but he was
protected from the wind by a fragment of the outhouse wall.
Every two or three minutes he stopped and listened for the sound
of a creaking, sliding footstep on the snow, but, never hearing
any, he always resumed his work with the same concentration. All
the while the wind rose and moaned through the ruins of the
little village. When Henry chanced to raise his head above the
sheltering wall, it was like the slash of a knife across his
cheek.
Finally he took half of the pine dust in his cap and a lot of the
splinters under his arm, and stole back to the house from which
the light had shone. He looked again through the crevice at the
window. The light had died down much more, and both Wyatt and
Coleman were asleep on the floor. But several of the Iroquois
were awake, although they sat as silent and motionless as stones
against the wall.
Henry moved from the window and selected a sheltered spot beside
the plank wall. There he put the pine dust in a little heap on
the snow and covered it over with pine splinters, on top of which
he put larger pieces of pine. Then he went back for the
remainder of the pine dust, and built a similar pyramid against a
sheltered side of the second house.
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