Indians were sprawled there now to keep him company, though.
She was a bit more hardened to such sights than she had been just a
short time ago. But what she saw in the cheerful June sky beyond the
palisade made her body go clammy-cold with horror.

A rope of thick, black smoke coiled upward, twisting this way and that,
spreading till it seemed to stain the entire eastern quarter of the sky.
The palisade was too high for her to see the fire itself, though red
tongues of flame shot up now and again in the midst of the smoke. But
she had no doubt at all about where the fire was.

"They're burning Victoire!" She started to cry.

She felt Frank's hand patting her shoulder, and turned.

"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