Van Grut frowned. "New militia from Virginia did arrive with two long bundles like bodies. I only saw from afar as I was sketching a partridge. One was taken into the infirmary, the other dumped by the guardhouse." He pointed to an earthwork ramp that led to a buried structure.
Duncan straightened as he saw that the sentinels at the ramp included not only two infantry regulars with Brown Bess muskets but also a man in the clothes of a frontiersman, a red patch of cloth on his tricorn hat. He spun about, spotting for the first time half a dozen tents pitched in the shade of the oaks at the northeast corner of the fort. He offered the Dutchman a quick salute and strode away.
Moments later he was behind a tree near the northern palisade, studying the little camp, watching the company for signs of leaders, settling on a square-shouldered bearded man addressed by the others as sergeant whose raspy voice and heavy knife confirmed him as Duncan's assailant of that morning. He crept closer, surveying a line of weapons leaning against a rail lashed between two trees. An instant after he spied his own long rifle, he strode out of his cover, casually lifting his weapon and filling its firing pan from the small horn of priming powder he kept in his pocket. He kept his head down as he approached the sergeant, tapping him on the shoulder with the end of his rifle barrel. As the man turned toward him he slammed the side of his gunstock into his belly, dropping him to his knees, knocking the knife from his hand as he reached for it.
The fury in the sergeant's eyes slackened as he recognized Duncan, and he waved away the men who were circling him. "It's a miracle, boys," the sergeant sneered. "The garbage has been resurrected from the midden."
"So it was your idea to bury me in the infirmary's waste," Duncan growled.
The sergeant made a chagrined gesture toward his men. "That be northern gratitude for ye, boys. We gave him a free hand and here's how he repays us." Guffaws rose from the militiamen. "If they had a doctor or a butcher here we would have poured some fresh blood on ye," he added in a more treacherous voice.
"I'll have my kit."
The Virginian spat toward Duncan's feet, leaving a dark stain of tobacco on the ground. "Gonna to be auctioned off, with that of the savage, to pay for the coffin of our brave captain."
Duncan pulled the hammer of his gun to the half-cock position and aimed it at the sergeant. "I'll have the kit you stole from me, and that of my friend." He ignored the soldiers who began to close around him, keeping his gaze leveled at the bearded man.
"Your red friend is promised a neck-stretching party. All the same to us if you wish to join him in hell. A man who shares his mess with such filth ain't much better himself."
"Son of a caoineag!" Duncan spat. The Highland curses shot from Duncan's lips unbidden as he heard himself invoke not just the spawn of a banshee, but the uruisg, the glaistig, and the oneeyed direach, monsters who avenged the innocent. He was barely able to control his fury.
"We be keeping close watch of your heathen's health," the sergeant chided. "If he looks to be dying we'll string him up without the major's verdict. We'll not be cheated of our justice."
Duncan pulled the hammer of his gun all the way back.
"Ye ain't gonna shoot me."
"No," Duncan agreed, and he swung his rifle toward a keg beside a mound of small bundles. "I'm going to blow your powder and supplies. Of course the splinters from the explosion may take a few of you. Ever see a man with three inches of oak in his eye?"
The sergeant cursed. Half a dozen men with clubs began to surround Duncan. The sergeant was beginning to lift his knife from the ground when he froze. Two shadows appeared at Duncan's side.
"'Tis a bonny thing to be practicing maneuvers, to be sure," came a voice thick with a Highland burr. "But we cannot let ye have all the enjoyment."
The men who stepped to either side of Duncan were huge, the spiked halberds in their hands long and lethal. Each wore a scarlet waistcoat over the plaid kilt of a Highland regiment.
The militia sergeant spat a curse. He slowly rose, calling off his men with a flick of his hand.
"Our friend asked for the return of his property," boomed the soldier to Duncan's left, a big ox of a man with curly red hair overflowing from his Highland bonnet.
On a quick, muttered command one of the militiamen slipped inside a tent then reappeared carrying a familiar powder horn, two packs, and nearly all the other equipment Duncan and Conawago had been traveling with.
"An Iroquois battle ax. A red battle ax," Duncan said. It was, he knew, a favorite souvenir for soldiers. The sergeant cursed again and retrieved it himself from a bedroll.
They stepped quickly away from the militia camp. "Sergeant Colin McGregor at y'er service," declared the red-haired man as he thumped his chest. "Such a fine string of Highland invocations be like a salve to me homesick heart. Did I detect the lilt of the western coast?"
"For as far back as memory," Duncan replied, a small grin tugging at his mouth, "the McCallum clan dwelled nigh Lochlash and in the lesser islands to the west. Now my clan is but me and my brother and an old man in the New York colony."
"Y'er brother?" McGregor asked. "Surely not our own beloved Captain Jamie McCallum?"
Duncan paused to study the garb of the men and recognized the dark tartan of the famed Black Watch, the 42nd Regiment of Foot. "Captain of the 42nd no longer." His brother had been branded a deserter after leaving the battleground of Ticonderoga to save a band of Iroquois holy men from ambush and had been declared an outlaw with a sizable bounty on his head.
McGregor fixed Duncan with an inquisitive gaze. "He was reported dead in a skirmish with French Indians last autumn."
"He was reported dead," Duncan agreed, leaving the words hanging.
"Sometimes," McGregor suggested, "it can be difficult to identify bodies when the heathens have finished with them."
"It can be difficult," Duncan agreed.
The big Scot offered a conspiratorial smile, then McGregor gestured Duncan forward. A moment later Duncan halted as he saw he was being led into the headquarters building.
"I need to see the man they brought into the guardhouse today."
"The old Indian? Dead, more than like," warned McGregor.
Duncan clamped his jaw against a tide of emotion. "I need to know."
"Even if he's not ye'11 not get near the cell without the blessing of Major Latchford," added the Scottish sergeant. "You can perform your supplication during your interview."
"Interview?"
"Lad, as happy as I be to rescue ye from those damned southern planters, truth is we were sent to find ye." McGregor abruptly stiffened as an oily-looking junior officer appeared at the door in front of them.
"They will polish their boots until I say they are done," the officer snapped in a shrill voice to someone over his shoulder, then paused to study Duncan with a disdainful gaze. He dismissed Duncan's escorts with a cool nod then muttered a syllable to someone in the shadows. A bent, gray-haired soldier appeared with a heavy brush.
Duncan awkwardly let the officer's valet brush the back of his waistcoat, then gently but firmly took the brush from the man's hand and finished the job himself. The officer frowned, stepped aside, and gestured him through the door. Past two tables stacked with maps was an inner office at which a starched and powdered officer sat, sipping from a china cup as he perused an open journal book.
"Your mongrel, Major," the young officer announced in the tone of one expecting a grand entertainment.
The officer frowned, first at Duncan then at his escort. "Fodder, Lieutenant. How much fodder is needed to overnight another fifty animals?"
"I will look into it at once, sir," the lieutenant replied.
"And the junior officers must be moved into tents by tomorrow."
"Of course, sir." The lieutenant offered not a salute but a servile bow of his powdered head then slipped away.