Shaman by Robert Shea (nice books to read TXT) 📖

step for step. A dance. The[280] brave with the red crest was still standing on the catwalk above the front gate, waving his tomahawk and shouting orders. The caller.

Nicole pulled open the drawstring of a bag of cartridges, bit off the end of a paper cartridge and poured the black powder down the muzzle of her rifle. She detached the ramrod from the stock of the rifle and wrapped a bullet in greased cloth, ramming it into place down the tight, rifled barrel. She thanked Heaven she hadn't forgotten how to do this.

She dropped the fine grains of priming powder from the horn into the powder pan, pointed her rifle at the red-crested brave and sighted down the black barrel at the center of his chest.

Her finger quivered on the trigger. She couldn't kill a man. Her eyes blurred.

If she didn't kill him, he might kill Frank. Or Tom or Ben. Or Papa. She remembered Burke Russell's smashed, bloody skull.

She had to do it. Her vision cleared.

She took deep breaths, steadying herself.

She heard the click of the hammer as she pulled back the trigger. The hammer snapped forward, the flint hit the fizzen, the spark struck the powder pan. The rifle went off with a thunderclap that made her ears ring, and her target was obscured by cream-colored smoke in front of the rifle port.

When the smoke cleared, the brave was still standing on the catwalk.

She clenched her fist and whispered, "Damn!"

The red-crested Indian glanced down to his right, as if he had heard a bullet strike the palisade wall there, then looked straight at her. She knew he couldn't really see her. She was hidden behind a log wall, and a hundred feet or more separated them. Even so, it seemed to her that his malevolent stare met her eyes.

She handed her rifle back to Bernadette Bosquet, a cook from the château, who gave her a loaded one.

Down in the yard, the Indians were charging the fur shop and the inn. The white men, retreating, were converging on the front door of the blockhouse.

She saw Elysée and Guichard emerge from behind the inn. The two old men moved slowly, Elysée limping heavily, both walking backward. Guichard fired a shot at the six or more crouching Indians coming at them. Elysée, his walking stick in his left hand,[281] raised his pistol. Guichard worked quickly with powder horn and ramrod to load his rifle. Elysée fired, bringing down one of the Indians. Both men took a few steps backward as powder smoke enveloped their attackers. The Indians darted forward, and Guichard raised his rifle. The Indians hesitated. Elysée stepped behind Guichard and tucked his stick under one arm to reload his pistol. At a word from Elysée, Guichard fired, and a red man with a rifle crumpled. Guichard, reaching for his powder horn, stepped backward behind Elysée, who now kept the Indians covered.

Nicole felt her legs tremble and a lump form in her throat as she watched the fearless precision with which her father and his lifelong servant carried out their retreat. Those two old men shouldn't have to fight at all, but today every man was needed.

She saw Frank and her two oldest sons, Tom and Ben, running across the yard to the front door. They vanished under the overhang of the blockhouse's second story, made of logs. Thank God they'd made it to safety! She felt faint and took a deep breath.

She handed her rifle to Bernadette. "Here, you shoot. I've got to see my husband and sons."

"Merci, madame. I thought you'd never give me a turn."

By the time Nicole got downstairs, Frank and the other men had crowded into the hall. The heavy front door of the blockhouse was shut and barred, throwing the stone-walled lower floor into near-darkness. Two men were shooting through the rifle ports on either side of the door. Women were lighting oil lamps and candles and setting them on shelves around the edges of the room.

Women whose men were here were holding them tight. Nicole threw her arms around Frank, then opened them wider to take in Tom and Ben as they ran to join their mother and father.

She eyed the boys. Their faces were rosy and their eyes bright with excitement. They'd be men in another year or two. And after today, she thought, Frank would have a hard time keeping them away from rifles.

If we live through this day.

As she felt Frank strong and alive against her, a sudden intense desire to make love to him came over her. She was shocked at herself.

But she'd seen one man struck down already and knew that before[282] sundown she or Frank might be dead. The realization of how precious Frank was to her had brought her body to passionate life.

She heard the shrieks and yips of the Indians in the yard of the trading post.

Hard-eyed David Cooper said, "We can't hold 'em off just shooting from the ground floor. We need shooters at every rifle port upstairs."

He nodded approvingly when he saw Elfrida Wegner and three other women molding bullets by the fire they had just kindled.

He called, "All right, four men and four of you women take rifle ports down here. The rest of you come up to the second story."

Gathering up extra rifles, five men and thirty or more women followed Cooper upstairs, where he organized them to shoot, each shooter to have someone to reload and carry ammunition.

Nicole might herself have volunteered to shoot through one of the upstairs rifle ports, but she chose to load for Frank. She felt it might be important to Frank that he be the one to shoot and she stand by, helping him. She would rather be at his side, anyway, than across the room somewhere shooting.

Frank pushed his octagonal rifle barrel out through his port. The port was only about six inches wide and three inches high, and the log wall was a foot thick or more, but Nicole still trembled at the thought that an Indian might manage to hit Frank with an arrow or a bullet. Working to load his second rifle, she tried not to think about that.

Thank God they had David Cooper here, someone who seemed to know what to do. She remembered how Cooper had spoken up the day Raoul had forced Auguste out of the château— Is this how you do things in Smith County? It was Cooper who had thrown open the trading post to the first refugees from the Indian raid, people from Victoire, shortly after dawn. He and Burke Russell. Burke. Her heart sank.

Nicole's fears turned to Victoire and to the outlying farms. The Indians had attacked so suddenly, whooping on horseback across the prairie, that there was just time for the people in Victor and some from the château to crowd into the trading post. Many of the children and some of the women gathered into the main room were still in their nightgowns. But missing from the crowd downstairs were people Nicole knew. Reverend Philip Hale and Nancy Hale,[283] Clarissa Greenglove and her two sons by Raoul, Marchette Perrault, many others. Fear twisted her belly as she thought of what the Indians might have done to them.

Cooper had assigned himself to a gunport in the east wall of the blockhouse. Nicole went to him.

"Mr. Cooper, could I have a look out there?"

"Certainly, ma'am." He sighed. "That used to be your home, that mansion on the hill, didn't it?"

Poor Burke Russell, she saw, was still lying on the eastern catwalk. Three dead 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.[284]

"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.

A blizzard in the trading post courtyard. Flecks of white filled the air between the inn and the blockhouse. She saw brown arms shaking slashed mattresses and pillows out the windows. Feathers floated up to the gunport. More feathers slowly drifted down to dot the fresh June grass with white. She heard yells and laughter from the inn.

They'd cut me open as soon as they'd cut open a pillow, and think that was just as funny.

"They're getting drunk," Frank said. "On all the liquor in Raoul's tavern. Must be looting the town too."

They'll burn our home. Everything will be gone, the beds and the dishes, the mirrors, the bureaus, the spinning wheel, the clock, the plates and silverware, our clothes, our books and old letters, children's toys, the spices, the cradle I rocked all our babies in. The machines and carpentry tools, and, oh, please, God, not Frank's printing press![285]

Stop it, Nicole. You're blessed! Blessed that they attacked at dawn when all the children were in the house and not scattered all over the countryside, and now they're safely in here. Blessed that your husband is standing here beside you and not dead on the palisade parapet like Burke Russell.

But even as she thought of things to be thankful for, she remembered what might happen to them in the next few hours.

An Indian charged out of the front door of the inn. He was waving a curving Navy cutlass. He ran at the blockhouse, screaming. His steps wavered, though, and Nicole guessed he must be full of whiskey.

Still she was terrified. What if everyone missed him and he somehow got in and others followed?

"Look out," Frank said, and gently nudged her away from the port. He pushed his rifle out and fired.

"I hit him, but he isn't falling."

Getting back into the routine, Nicole took Frank's rifle and loaded it. Rifles were booming all along the front of the blockhouse as men tried to stop the Indian with the cutlass. Frank's second rifle went off.

"He doesn't want to die," said Frank. "He's full of bullets." She heard pain in his voice, and as she handed him his freshly loaded rifle, Nicole saw that his upper lip was beaded with sweat. She hurt for him. He