Frank put a hand on the floor and pushed himself to his feet. "Yes, as long as I think about my family I'll be able to shoot." There was a bitterness in his voice, and Nicole felt she knew what he was thinking. How cruel the irony, that love for his family could make him into a killer. "Here they come again!" a woman down the line shouted. Again and again Nicole heard the rapping of bullets into the log wall near Frank's head as he fired steadily at Indians charging from the trading post buildings they had captured. Frank turned from the rifle port to hand Nicole an empty rifle and take a loaded one. An arrow flashed through the narrow opening, missing his head by inches. _Thank you, God!_ The defenders kept up a steady fire until the Indians withdrew again into the captured buildings. Nicole and Frank took turns watching through the rifle port. What was happening to their home at this moment? The lull stretched on. Nicole went downstairs to look for her children, began picking her way through the crowd sitting on the floor of the blockhouse hall. Stretched out on a bench was a woman whose name she didn't know, a newcomer to the settlement. The right side of her checkered dress was soaked with blood from shoulder to waist. Moaning faintly, the woman seemed half conscious. "Arrow," said Ellen Slattery, who was pressing a folded cloth against the woman's shoulder. Nicole shuddered and patted Ellen's back and went on. She saw Tom and Ben manning ground-floor gunports. Abigail, Martha and John were playing around the cannon, pretending to shoot it at the Indians. The three youngest, Rachel, Betsy and Patrick, were with a group gathered in the stone-walled rear room Raoul used as his office. They were singing hymns. Pamela Russell, she saw, was also with the hymn singers, tears running down her face. As Nicole went over to the fireplace to join the women molding bullets, she heard: "My God, how many are my fears, How fast my foes increase! Their number how it multiplies! How fatal to my peace." _That must be the first time_ those _walls have ever heard a hymn._ Nicole took a turn at bullet making, ladling the silvery molten lead from a kettle over the fire into the tiny hole in the hollowed-out mold, opening the mold with its scissor handles and dropping the still-warm ball into a big basket. Another woman took each ball and filed away the bit of waste metal formed in the hole through which the lead was poured. "Injuns!" a man yelled. The women and children crouched down on the floor, and Nicole hurried upstairs to help Frank. After rifle fire from both levels drove back the latest assault, Frank said, "We get a few each time they attack, but it's not enough. I'm sure I saw over a hundred of them when I was on the parapet."