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 were blacker with the stuff than Frank's ever were from his printing press.
Frank was firing less and less often. He leaned against the log wall, wiping his arm across his forehead.
"We've kept pouring lead into the courtyard. That's driven them under cover. But they broke holes in the corner tower walls, and they're shooting back at us from there." An Indian yelp caught his attention, and he peered out again.
"Now, would you look at that!" he said. Nicole put her head next to his at the rifle port.