tairs 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."

"We've no food and very little water," said Nicole. "They could just
wait us out and we wouldn't last very long." The only water they had was
in buckets the townspeople had brought into the blockhouse with them.

David Cooper said, "We've got to be ready for them to make one big rush
for the blockhouse. They'll try to set the place on fire, so we better
save as much water as we can. Ration it out."

Nicole's body broke out in a cold sweat at the thought of fire; she
remembered all the gunpowder they'd relayed into the blockhouse.

_Enough to blow us all up._

And then she remembered too, what