Outlander - Diana Gabaldon [311]
From the vantage point to which she led me, on a small ledge overlooking the ford, we could see almost all of the men of the Watch, mostly dismounted and talking in casual groups, some sitting on the ground eating, some leading the horses in groups of two and three to the water. What we couldn’t see was Jamie.
“Do you suppose they’ve killed him?” I whispered in panic. I had counted every man twice, to be sure I had missed no one. There were twenty men and twenty-six horses; all in plain view, so far as I could see. But no hint of a prisoner, and no telltale gleam of sun on red hair.
“I doubt it,” Jenny answered. “But there’s only one way to find out.” She began to squirm backward from the ledge.
“What’s that?”
“Ask.”
The road narrowed as it left the ford, becoming little more than a dusty trail through dense stands of pine and alder on either side. The trail was not wide enough for the Watch to ride two abreast; each man would have to pass down it in single file.
As the last man in the line approached a bend in the trail, Jenny Murray stepped suddenly out in the road ahead of him. His horse shied, and the man struggled to rein it in, cursing. As he opened his mouth to demand indignantly what she meant by this behavior, I stepped out of the bush behind, and whacked him solidly behind the ear with a fallen branch.
Taken completely by surprise, he lost his balance as the horse shied again, and fell off into the roadway. He wasn’t stunned; the blow had only knocked him over. Jenny remedied this deficiency with the assistance of a good-sized rock.
She grabbed the horse’s reins and gestured violently to me.
“Come on!” she whispered. “Get him off the road before they notice he’s gone.”
So it was that when Robert MacDonald of the Glen Elrive Watch recovered consciousness, it was to find himself securely tied to a tree, looking down the barrel of a pistol held by the steely-eyed sister of his erstwhile prisoner.
“What have ye done wi’ Jamie Fraser?” she demanded.
MacDonald shook his head dazedly, obviously thinking her a figment of his imagination. An attempt to move put paid to this notion, and after an allowance for the statutory amount of cursing and threatening, he at last reconciled himself to the idea that the only way to get loose was to tell us what we wanted to know.
“He’s dead,” MacDonald said sullenly. Then, as Jenny’s finger tightened ominously on the trigger, he added in sudden panic, “It wasna me! It was his own fault!”
Jamie, he said, had been mounted double, arms bound with a leather strap, behind one of the Watch, riding between two other men. He had seemed docile enough, and they had taken no particular precautions when fording the river six miles from the mill.
“Damn fool threw himself off the horse and into the deep water,” said MacDonald, shrugging as well as he could with his hands tied behind him. “We fired at him. Must have hit him, for he didna come up again. But the stream’s swift just below the ford, and it’s deep. We searched a bit, but no body. Must ha’ been carried downstream. Now, for God’s sake, ladies, will ye no untie me!”
After repeated threats from Jenny had elicited no further details or changes in his story, we decided to accept it as true. Declining to free MacDonald altogether, Jenny did at least loosen his bonds, so that given time, he might struggle out of them. Then we ran.
“Do you think he’s dead?” I puffed, as we reached the tethered horse.
“I don’t. Jamie swims like a fish, and I’ve seen him hold his breath for three minutes at a time. Come on. We’re going to search the river bank.”
We cast up and down the banks of the river, stumbling on rocks, splashing in the shallows, scratching our hands and faces on the willows that trawled their branches in the pools.
At last Jenny gave a triumphant shout, and I splashed my way across, balancing precariously