"I was hoping the people of Victoire might be able to hold out," she said. Frank put his arm around her. "Nicole, I'm sorry, it's pretty likely the only people left alive from Victoire are already here. Lucky most of them could outrun the Indians and get here." "But, Frank, what's happened to the rest of them--Marchette, Clarissa--are they all dead?" Frank didn't answer. He just stood there holding her. Grief weighed on her like a cloak of iron. If she hadn't had Frank to lean against, she would surely have fallen to the floor. She looked out again and saw other, more distant columns of smoke. The Indians must have come from the east and struck every farmhouse they came across. They had surely destroyed Philip Hale's church. Poor Nancy! David Cooper said, "Sometimes people manage to hide. The Indians can't look everywhere." The weight on her back and shoulders seemed to lighten with that thought. "Yes, the lead mine, for instance," Frank said. "A perfect place." "Oh, they can't have killed all those people," Nicole said. _Please, let Marchette and Clarissa and Nancy and Reverend Hale be alive._ She desperately wanted to pray. She wanted to believe that a loving God was looking down on Victoire and Victor, protecting her friends and the people she had grown up with. For the next hour or more Nicole thought of nothing and did nothing but bite cartridges and dump powder, ram home bullets, put one rifle into Frank's ink-stained hands, take the other rifle and load it. Her mouth was sore from biting the heavy paper. Her arms and hands ached from making the same movements over and over. The incessant shooting all around her deafened her, the stink--and, worse, the taste--of gunpowder turned her stomach, and her hands were blacker with the stuff than Frank's ever were from his printing press. Frank was firing less and less often. He leaned against the log wall, wiping his arm across his forehead. "We've kept pouring lead into the courtyard. That's driven them under cover. But they broke holes in the corner tower walls, and they're shooting back at us from there." An Indian yelp caught his attention, and he peered out again. "Now, would you look at that!" he said. Nicole put her head next to his at the rifle port. A blizzard in the trading post courtyard. Flecks of white filled the air between the inn and the blockhouse. She saw brown arms shaking slashed mattresses and pillows out the windows. Feathers floated up to the gunport. More feathers slowly drifted down to dot the fresh June grass with white. She heard yells and laughter from the inn. _They'd cut me open as soon as they'd cut open a pillow, and think that was just as funny._ "They're getting drunk," Frank said. "On all the liquor in Raoul's tavern. Must be looting the town too."