lled?_ Nicole wondered. _So utterly
vengeful?_

Cooper said, "Sure you can do it?"

Pamela whispered through tight lips, "Oh, yes. Yes, I am!"

"All right," said Cooper. "You can touch it off. But look out the
Indians don't shoot you when we swing the door open."

Frank, Cooper and two more men kicked the chocks out from under the
cannon's four wooden wheels. The men strained against the gun, and for a
moment Nicole was afraid they wouldn't be able to move it. Then,
grudgingly, it rumbled over the puncheon floor until Cooper set the four
chocks back under the wheels. The cannon rested just a few feet back
from the front door.

Looking through a port on the west side of the hall, Nicole saw the sun
still high in the west. This was the month when days were longest.

_And this has been the longest day of my life_, she thought.

As the afternoon passed with agonizing slowness, Pamela Russell had to
light yet a second candle, and then a third. She sat rigid in a chair
beside the cannon, holding her candle upright, saying nothing, staring
fixedly at the blockhouse door.

Nicole noticed a beam of sunlight from a west-facing rifle port lighting
up the smoke and dust that drifted through the main hall of the
blockhouse. The shaft of light looked like a solid bar of gold. She
looked through the rifle port and was almost blinded by the sun just
above the humped silhouettes of hills across the Mississippi.

She heard the Indians screaming, and her stomach turned over.

"Fire arrows!" someone yelled.

Nicole's heart stopped. If the Indians managed to set fire to the
blockhouse, the hundreds of people who had taken shelter here would be
driven out to be slaughtered.

She ran to the slot in the stone wall where Tom was standing with his
rifle ready. Looking past her son's head, she saw an arrow with a
cloth-wrapped, burning tip arc up from the courtyard. It disappeared,
and she thought it must have hit the second-story log wall somewhere
above her.

"Upstairs!" Cooper shouted. "Fill your buckets from the water barrels
and come on." His sweeping finger included a bunch of excited smaller
boys, who followed him up the stairs. Nicole hurried after them.

Cooper and the other men boosted boys with buckets to the top of the log
walls. The boys pulled themselves up to the open space Nicole had
noticed before under the overhang of the roof. Leaning out, sheltered,
the boys were able to see where the fire arrows had stuck, an