The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [406]
“I’m looking for Hermon Husband,” he said bluntly to a man roasting a squirrel over the pale flames of a fire. The man looked blank for a moment.
“The Quaker?” Roger amplified.
“Oh, aye, him,” the man said, features clearing. “He’s a ways beyond—that way, I think.” He gestured helpfully with his stick, the charred squirrel pointing the way with the stubs of its blackened forelegs.
“A ways beyond” was some way. Roger passed through three more scattered camps before reaching what looked to be the main body of the army—if one could dignify it by such a term. True, there did seem to be an increasing air of seriousness; there was less of the carefree frolicking he had seen near the creek. Still, it wasn’t Strategic Command headquarters, by a long shot.
He began to feel mildly hopeful that violence could still be avoided, even with the armies drawn up face to face and the gun-crews standing by. There had been an air of excited readiness among the militia as he passed through their lines, but no atmosphere of hatred or blood-thirstiness.
Here, the situation was far different than it was among the orderly militia lines, but even less disposed to immediate hostilities. As he pressed on further, though, asking his way at each campfire he passed, he began to feel something different in the air—a sense of increasing urgency, almost of desperation. The horseplay he’d seen in the outer camps had vanished; men clustered talking in close groups, their heads together, or sat by themselves, grimly loading guns and sharpening knives.
As he got closer, the name of Hermon Husband was recognized by everyone, the pointing fingers surer of direction. The name seemed almost a magnet, pulling him farther and farther into the center of a thickening mass of men and boys, all excited—all armed. The noise grew greater all the time, voices beating on his ears like hammers on a forge.
He found Husband at last, standing on a rock like a large gray wolf at bay, surrounded by a knot of some thirty or forty men, all clamoring in angry agitation. Elbows jabbed and feet trampled, without regard to impact on their fellows. Clearly they were demanding an answer, but unable to pause long enough to hear one were it given.
Husband, stripped to his shirtsleeves and red in the face, was shouting at one or two of those closest to him, but Roger could hear nothing of what was said, above the general hub-bub. He pushed through the outer ring of spectators, but was stopped nearer the center by the press of men. At least here, he could pick up a few words.
“We must! You know it, Hermon, there’s no choice!” shouted a lanky man in a battered hat.
“There’s always a choice!” Husband bellowed back. “Now is the time to choose, and God send we do it wisely!”
“Aye, with cannon pointed at us?”
“No, no, forward, we must go forward, or all is lost!”
“Lost? We have lost everything so far! We must—”
“The Governor’s taken choice from us, we must—”
“We must—”
“We must—!”
All single words were lost in a general roar of anger and frustration. Seeing that there was nothing to be gained by waiting for an audience, Roger shoved his way ruthlessly between two farmers and seized Husband by the sleeve of his shirt.
“Mr. Husband—I must speak with you!” he shouted in the Quaker’s ear.
Husband gave him a glazed sort of look, and made to shake him off, but then stopped, blinking as he recognized him. The square face was flushed with color above the sprouting beard, and Husband’s coarse gray hair, unbound, bristled out from his head like the quills of a porcupine. He shook his head and shut his eyes, then opened them again, staring at Roger like a man seeking to dispel some impossible vision, and failing.
He grabbed Roger’s arm, and with a fierce gesture at the crowd, leaped down from his rock and made off toward the shelter of a ramshackle cabin that leaned drunkenly in the shade of a maple grove. Roger followed, glaring round at those nearest to discourage pursuit.
A few followed, nonetheless, waving arms and expostulating hotly, but Roger slammed the door in their