Both men were now in the shed. I made the most desperate efforts
to call to mind what tools and other things were left in it which
might be used against me. But my agitation confused me. I could
remember nothing except my father's big stone-saw, which was far
too heavy and unwieldy to be used on the roof of the cottage. I
was still puzzling my brains, and making my head swim to no
purpose, when I heard the men dragging something out of the shed.
At the same instant that the noise caught my ear, the remembrance
flashed across me like lightning of some beams of wood which had
lain in the shed for years past. I had hardly time to feel
certain that they were removing one of these beams before I heard
Shifty Dick say to Jerry.

"Which door?"

"The front," was the answer. "We've cracked it already; we'll
have it down now in no time."

Senses less sharpened by danger than mine would have understood
but too easily, from these words, that they were about to use the
beam as a battering-ram against the door. When that conviction
overcame me, I lost courage at last. I felt that the door must
come down. No such barricade as I had constructed could support
it for more than a few minutes against such shocks as it was now
to receive.

"I can do no more to keep the house against them," I said to
myself, with my knees knocking together, and the tears at last
beginning to wet my cheeks. "I must trust to the night and the