the people in the trading post held the Indians
off all day and finally drove them away by firing the cannon. Then came
the grievous task of finding and burying those who had not had time to
reach safety.

Then, for Raoul, the most dreadful lines of all:

In the ashes of Victoire, it appeared from examination of the
charred remains that the skulls of the men and women had been cloven
by tomahawk blows. Parts of the children's bodies were scattered
about the ruins, as if they had been chopped to bits before the
Indians set fire to the great house.

Why hadn't Clarissa gotten away? She'd taken to drinking heavily in the
last year, so much so that he'd had to hit her more than once for
letting the boys run loose without keeping an eye on them. She had
probably been lying abed in a drunken stupor while everyone was fleeing
the chateau, the boys sleeping in the room with her. Hadn't anyone tried
to wake them?

Those faithful French servants who loved Elysee and Pierre so much, they
didn't give a damn about Raoul's whore and his bastard sons. After all,
he had thwarted Pierre's dying wishes. And he had struck his aged father
with his fist in front of all those Victoire people.

Still, they'd have been human enough to try to do _something_. If they'd
had time. They'd holler and bang on the door. Try to wake them up. But
there wouldn't have been time. A hundred or more Indians galloping down
on the chateau. The servants who saw them coming would barely have time
to get away. Some of them hadn't made it. Some of them had died with
Clarissa and the boys; maybe the ones who'd stayed behind to try to warn
them.

That was how it must have been.

Frank's article in the _Visitor_ said that some of the people in the
distant farms had saved themselves by hiding in root cellars or in
nearby woods. The Indians were in too much of a hurry to get to Victor
to bother searching carefully. One family, the Flemings, had ridden to
the shut-down lead mine. Some Indians pursued them to the mine but
didn't follow them in. The Flemings hid so deep in the mine they had
trouble finding their way out again, but they did survive.

But one person had neither hidden nor been killed:

While the body of the Reverend Philip Hale, D.D., was found in the
burnt wreckage of his house, his daughter, Miss Nancy Hale, has not
been found. It is feared Miss Hale may have been kidnapped by the
Indians. Both the church an