The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [491]
Josiah had crouched in his tree, no more than a few feet above the man’s head, holding his breath. The man had gone on, disappearing at once into the heavy undergrowth. Josiah had been just about to descend from his perch when he had heard a sudden exclamation of surprise, followed by the sounds of a brief scuffle that concluded with a sickening thunk!
“Just like a ripe squash when you chunk it with a rock to break it open,” he assured Jamie. “Made my arse-hole draw up like a purse-string, hearin’ that noise, there in the dark.”
Alarm was no bar to curiosity, though, and he had eased through the wood in the direction of the sound. He could hear a rustling noise, and as he peered cautiously through a screen of cedar branches, he made out a human form stretched upon the ground, and another bending over it, evidently struggling to pull some kind of garment off the prone man’s body.
“He was dead,” Josiah explained, matter-of-factly. “I could smell the blood, and a shit-smell, too. Reckon the little fella caved in his head with a rock or maybe a club.”
“Little fella?” Peter had been following the story with close attention. “How little d’ye mean? Did ye see his face?”
Josiah shook his head.
“No, I saw naught but the shadow of him, movin’ about. It was full dark, still; the sky hadn’t started to go light yet.” He squinted, making a mental estimate. “Reckon he’d be shorter than me; maybe so high.” He held out a hand in illustration, measuring a distance some four and a half feet from the ground.
The murderer had been interrupted in his work of plundering the body, though. Josiah, intent on watching, had noticed nothing, until there came a sudden crack from a breaking stick, and the inquiring whuff of a questing bear.
“You best believe the little fella run when he heard that,” he assured Jamie. “He dashed right past, no further from me than you are now. That was when I got the only good look I had at him.”
“Well, don’t keep us in suspense,” I said, as he paused to take a gulp of his beer. “What did he look like?”
He wiped a line of foam from the sparse whiskers on his upper lip, looking thoughtful.
“Well, ma’am, I was pretty near sure he was the devil. Only I did think the devil would be bigger,” he added, taking another drink.
This statement naturally caused some confusion. Upon further elucidation, it appeared that Josiah merely meant that the mysterious “little fella” had been black.
“Wasn’t ’til I went along to that Gathering of yours that it come to me that some regular folks just are black,” he explained. “I hadn’t never seen anybody who was, nor heard tell of it, neither.”
Kezzie nodded soberly at this.
“Devil in the Book,” he said, in his odd, gruff voice.
“The Book,” it seemed, was an old Bible that Aaron Beardsley had taken somewhere in trade and never found a buyer for. Neither of the boys had ever been taught to read, but they were most entertained by the pictures in the Book, which included several drawings of the devil, depicted as a crouching black creature, going about his sly business of tempting and seduction.
“I didn’t see no forked tail,” Josiah said, shaking his head, “but then, he went by so fast, stood to reason I might have missed it in the dark and all.”
Not wanting to draw the attention of such a person to himself, Josiah had stood still, and thus been in a position to hear the bear giving its attention to the unfortunate inhabitant of the village.
“It’s like Mr. Peter says,” he said, nodding at Peter Bewlie in acknowledgment. “Bears ain’t particular. I never did see this ’un, so I can’t say was it the white one or no—but it surely did eat on that Indian. I heard it, chawin’ and slobberin’ like anything.” He seemed untroubled by this recollection, but I saw Brianna’s nostrils pinch at the thought.
Jamie exchanged looks with Peter, then glanced back at Josiah. He rubbed a forefinger slowly down the bridge of his nose, thinking.
“Well, then,” he said at last. “It seems that not all the evil doings in your brother-in-law