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.

She called two of the bigger boys to carry baskets of shot upstairs. But
carrying powder--that was dangerous. She couldn't make herself ask
anyone else to do that.

She filled a bushel basket with sacks of cartridges, added a powder horn
on top, swung it up to her shoulder and charged up the stairs, terrified
all the way.

"Judas Priest, you're _strong_, Missuz Hopkins," said one of the boys
carrying shot. It gave her a warm feeling to hear that; she figured most
people thought of her as just plain fat.

She still couldn't believe she was going to do this. Going to try to
kill people. She picked out a slot in the log wall and pushed her rifle
barrel through it. She could see a bit of the courtyard below. White men
were falling back from the t