The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [143]
The kerchief hung in tatters by this time, and small clouds of whitish smoke floated over the meadow. The hawk had decamped at the sound of the first shot, along with all the other birds of the neighborhood, though the ringing in his ears sounded like a whole chorus of distant titmice.
He lowered the gun and looked at Brianna, grinning, whereupon she burst into laughter.
“You look like the end man in a minstrel show,” she said, the end of her nose going pink with amusement. “Here, clean up a little, and we’ll try shooting from farther away.”
She took the gun and handed him a clean handkerchief in exchange. He wiped black soot from his face, watching as she swiftly swabbed the barrel and reloaded. She straightened, then heard something; her head rose suddenly, eyes fixing on an oak across the meadow.
Ears still ringing from the roar of the gun, Roger had heard nothing. Swinging round, though, he caught a flicker of movement; a dark gray squirrel, poised on a pine branch at least thirty feet above the ground.
Without the slightest hesitation, Brianna raised the gun to her shoulder and seemed to fire in the same motion. The branch directly under the squirrel exploded in a shower of wood chips, and the squirrel, blown off its feet, plunged to the ground, bouncing off the springy evergreen branches as it went.
Roger ran across to the foot of the tree, but there was no need to hurry; the squirrel lay dead, limp as a furry rag.
“Good shot,” he said in congratulation, holding up the corpse as Brianna came to see. “But there’s not a mark on him—you must have scared him to death.”
Brianna gave him a level look from beneath her brows.
“If I’d meant to hit him, Roger, I’d have hit him,” she said, with a slight edge of reproof. “And if I had hit him, you’d be holding a handful of squirrel mush. You don’t aim right at something that size; you aim to hit just under them and knock them down. It’s called barking,” she explained, like a kindly kindergarten teacher correcting a slow pupil.
“Oh, aye?” He repressed a small sense of irritation. “Your father teach you that?”
She gave him a slightly odd look before replying.
“No, Ian did.”
He made a noncommittal noise in response to that. Ian was a point of awkwardness in the family. Brianna’s cousin had been well-loved, and he knew the whole family missed him. Still, they hesitated to speak of Young Ian before Roger, out of delicacy.
It hadn’t exactly been Roger’s fault that Ian Murray had remained with the Mohawk—but there was no denying that he had had a part in the matter. If he hadn’t killed that Indian . . .
Not for the first time, he pushed aside the confused memories of that night in Snaketown, but felt nonetheless the physical echoes; the quicksilver rush of terror through his belly and the judder of impact through the muscles of his forearms, as he drove the broken end of a wooden pole with all his strength into a shadow that had sprung up before him out of the shrieking dark. A very solid shadow.
Brianna had crossed the meadow, and set up another target; three irregular chunks of wood set on a stump the size of a dinner table. Without comment, he wiped his sweating hands on his breeks, and concentrated on the new challenge, but Ian Murray refused to leave his mind. He’d barely seen the man, but remembered him clearly; hardly more than a youth, tall and gangly, with a homely but appealing face.
He couldn’t think of Murray’s face without seeing it as he last had, scabbed with a line of freshly tattooed dots that looped across the cheeks and over the bridge of his nose. His face was brown from the sun, but the skin of his freshly plucked scalp had been a fresh and startling pink, naked as a baby’s bum and blotched red from the irritation of the plucking.
“What’s the matter?”
Brianna’s voice startled him, and the barrel jerked up as he fired, the shot going wild. Or wilder, rather. He hadn’t managed to hit any of the wooden blocks in a dozen shots.
He lowered the gun and turned