To her relief Nicole saw no dead white men anywhere--except for Burke Russell, who lay still, his head a bright red mess, one arm hanging down over the edge of the eastern catwalk. She looked at him quickly and then looked away, feeling sick again. What made it even more of a shame that Burke had died on the palisade was that the men never planned to hold it. They just wanted to delay the Indians a bit. Here in the blockhouse was where they hoped to be able to hold out. With God's help. "Oh, Burke! Oh, my Burke!" Pamela Russell was awake and screaming. Ellen Slattery looked helplessly at Nicole. Nicole felt heartbroken for Pamela, but she had to let her be. There was too much to do. She ran through the people crowded into the main room on the ground floor of the blockhouse. There must be four hundred people here, mostly women and children, she thought. _And Raoul's got over a hundred men from Victor with him. God knows where._ Here they had more rifles than men. Two dozen rifles leaned against the stone wall. Many families owned two or three rifles, and people had grabbed them as they fled to the trading post. _Well, a woman can ram a ball down a muzzle and pull a trigger too._ And miss, she thought, her heart a ball of ice. She hadn't seen one Indian hit yet. Nicole spoke loudly to the women around her. "The Indians will be shooting down from the catwalk at our men when they try to get back here to us." She started to load a rifle. "We've got to shoot at the Indians and drive them to cover." She had not held a rifle in her hands since marrying Frank, who would not have a firearm in the house. But Elysee de Marion had taught his daughter how to shoot, and she had not forgotten. Piled by the rifles were flannel bags, powder horns and five small barrels, all full of gunpowder. In that frantic dawn, after fleeing here, the men and women had formed a relay line to rush the bags and barrels of gunpowder from Raoul's stone magazine to the blockhouse. Feeling a bit more hopeful, Nicole noticed lead ingots lying beside the ammunition--probably from the lead mine that Raoul had shut down just before leaving Victor. And she saw scissor-shaped bullet molds. They had some of the things they needed. If only they knew how to use these things. "Who knows how to mold bullets?" she asked the group of women who'd been standing silently, watching her. "I know," Elfrida Wegner said. Of course, thought Nicole. Her husband had been a soldier, over in Europe. "Take some others and show them how to do it," Nicole said. "We're going to need all the bullets we can make." Elfrida and two other women carried the lead bars and the molds to the huge fireplace at the rear of the hall. From the hundred and more women crowded into the hall Nicole collected ten volunteers who knew something about rifles, five to shoot and five to load.