The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [211]
He slid off his horse, and had just turned to call to the others when a hand clutched his arm.
“Attendez.” Fergus spoke softly, barely moving his lips. He was standing beside Roger, looking at something beyond him. “Do not move.”
Roger didn’t, nor did any of the men still on their horses. Whatever Fergus saw, so did they.
“What is it?” Roger asked, keeping his voice low, too.
“Someone—two someones—are pointing guns at us, through the window.”
“Ah.” Roger noted Jamie’s good sense in not riding into Brownsville after dark the night before. Evidently, he knew something about the suspicious nature of remote places.
Moving very slowly, he raised both his hands into the air, and jerked his chin at Fergus, who reluctantly did the same, his hook gleaming in the afternoon sun. Still keeping his hands up, Roger turned very slowly. Even knowing what to expect, he felt his stomach contract at sight of the two long, gleaming barrels protruding from behind the oiled deerskin that covered the window.
“Hallo the house!” he shouted, with as much authority as could be managed with his hands over his head. “I am Captain Roger MacKenzie, in command of a militia company under Colonel James Fraser, of Fraser’s Ridge!”
The only effect of this intelligence was to cause one gun barrel to swivel, centering on Roger, so that he could look straight down the small, dark circle of its muzzle. The unwelcome prospect did, though, cause him to realize that the other gun had not been trained on him to start with. It had been, and remained, pointing steadily over his right shoulder, toward the cluster of men who still sat their horses behind him, shifting in their saddles and murmuring uneasily.
Great. Now what? The men were waiting for him to do something. Moving slowly, he lowered his hands. He was drawing breath to shout again, but before he could speak, a hoarse voice rang out from behind the deerskin.
“I see you, Morton, you bastard!”
This imprecation was accompanied by a significant jerk of the first gun barrel, which turned abruptly from Roger to focus on the same target as the second—presumably Isaiah Morton, one of the militiamen from Granite Falls.
There was a scuffling noise among the mounted men, startled shouts, and then all hell broke loose as both guns went off. Horses reared and bolted, men bellowed and swore, and drifts of acrid white smoke fumed from the window.
Roger had thrown himself flat at the first explosion. As the echoes died away, though, he scrambled up as though by reflex, flung mud out of his eyes, and charged the door, headfirst. To his detached surprise, his mind was working very clearly. Brianna took twenty seconds to load and prime a gun, and he doubted that these buggers were much faster. He thought he had just about ten seconds’ grace left, and he meant to use them.
He hit the door with his shoulder, and it flew inward, smashing against the wall inside and causing Roger to rush staggering into the room and crash into the wall on the opposite side. He struck his shoulder a numbing blow on the chimney piece, bounced off, and managed somehow to keep his feet, stumbling like a drunkard.
Several people in the room had turned to gape at him. His vision cleared enough to see that only two of them were in fact holding guns. He took a deep breath, lunged for the nearest of these, a scrawny man with a straggling beard, and seized him by the shirtfront, in imitation of a particularly fearsome third-form master at Roger’s grammar school.
“What do you think you are doing, you wee man, you!?” he roared, jerking the man up onto his toes. Mr. Sanderson would have been pleased, he supposed, at the thought that his example had been so memorable. Effective, too; while the scrawny man in Roger’s grip did not either wet himself or snivel, as the first-form students occasionally had under such treatment, he did make small gobbling sounds, pawing ineffectually at Roger’s hand clutching his shirt.