The Matchlock Gun

Ten year old Edward Van Alstyne lives with his mother Gertrude and younger sister Trudy on an isolated farm in New York's Hudson Valley in 1756, during the border warfare of the French and Indian War. When his father rides off with the local militia to help defend a neighboring settlement, he leaves behind an old Spanish matchlock gun so heavy it has to be fired from a rest, and tells Edward that if raiders come, the boy is the one who must use it. Gertrude spends the tense days that follow drilling Edward on loading and priming the weapon, since her own hands are needed elsewhere and a child is the only person left in the house who can be spared to hold a post at the window. When a raiding party finally reaches the farm and sets it ablaze, Gertrude is struck down defending the children, and it falls to Edward alone to touch off the matchlock through the window, killing three of the attackers and scattering the rest before his father and the militia arrive.

It is a short, plainly told book, built almost entirely around that single afternoon of waiting and its violent resolution, and it reads in one sitting even for a young reader. The suspense comes from procedure as much as danger, the gun has to be loaded exactly right or it will not fire at all, which makes Edward's small, careful actions as gripping as the attack itself. Parents should know the ending is a child killing armed adults in self defense, described plainly rather than graphically, and that the raiders are drawn without individual names or motives.