The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [424]
“Stop right there.” Jamie crouched behind his gun, training the muzzle on Hobson’s chest. Hobson halted as though a puppet-master had jerked his strings.
“What have ye done to him?” Hobson’s eyes flicked from Jamie to his son-in-law and back.
“Nothing permanent. Put your gun down, aye?”
Hobson didn’t move. He was grimed with filth and sprouting a beard, but the eyes were live and watchful in his face.
“I mean ye nay harm. Set it down!”
“We’ll not be taken,” Hobson said. His finger rested on the trigger of his gun, but there was a dubious note in his voice.
“Ye already are, fool. Dinna fash yourself, nay harm will come to you or the lad. You’re a deal safer in gaol than out here, man!”
A whistling crash punctuated his statement, as something flew through the trees a few feet overhead, shearing branches as it went. Chain shot, Jamie thought automatically, even as he ducked in reflex, bowels clenched.
Hobson jerked in terror, swinging the barrel of his musket toward Jamie. He jerked again, and his eyes went wide with surprise, as a red stain flowered slowly on his breast. He looked down at it in puzzlement, the muzzle of his gun drooping like a wilted stem. Then he dropped the gun, sat down quite suddenly, leaned back against a fallen tree, and died.
Jamie whirled on his heel, still squatting, and saw Geordie Chisholm behind him, face half-black with the smoke of his shot, looking at Hobson’s body as though wondering just how that had happened.
The boom of artillery came again, and another missile crashed through the branches and landed nearby with a thud Jamie felt through the soles of his boots. He flung himself flat on his belly and writhed toward Hugh Fowles, who had got himself up on hands and knees now, retching.
He grabbed Fowles’s arm, disregarding the pool of vomit, and jerked, hard.
“Come on!” He scrambled up, seizing Fowles by waist and shoulder, and dragged him toward the shelter of the copse behind them. “Geordie! Geordie, help me!”
Chisholm was there. Between them, they got Fowles onto his feet and half-dragged, half-carried him, running and stumbling as they went.
The air was filled with the pungent scent of tree-sap, oozing from the severed branches, and he thought fleetingly of Claire’s garden, turned earth, churned earth beneath his boots, the fresh-turned earth of furrows and graves, and Hobson sitting in the sun by the log, the look of surprise not yet gone from his eyes.
Fowles stank of vomit and shit. He hoped it was Fowles.
He thought he would vomit himself from sheer nerves, but bit his tongue, tasting blood again, and clenched the muscles of his belly, willing his wame to go back down.
Someone rose from the shrubbery to his left. He held the gun in his left hand, raised it by reflex, fired one-handed. He stumbled through his own smoke, seeing whoever he had fired at turn and run, smashing heedless through the trees.
Fowles had his feet back under him now, and Jamie let go his arm, leaving Geordie to it. He fell to one knee, groping for powder and shot, ripped the cartridge with his teeth and tasted gunpowder tinged with blood, poured and rammed home, filled his priming pan, checked his flint—all the while noticing with a sense of bemusement that his hands were not shaking in the least, but went about their business with a deft calm, as though they knew just what to do.
He raised the barrel and bared his teeth, only half-conscious of doing it. There were men coming, three, and he raised the gun to bear on the first. With a last shred of conscious thought, he jerked it higher and fired above their heads, the musket jolting in his hands. They stopped, and he dropped the gun, ripped the dirk from his belt, and charged them, screaming.
The words seared his throat, raw from the smoke.
“Run!”
As though from a distance, he watched himself, thinking that it was just so that Hugh Fowles had done, and he had thought it foolish then.
“Run!