He crossed himself, with a quick prayer to St. Michael, and threaded his horse carefully through a clump of spruce. Emerging on the far side, he saw the flash of a horse’s flank and heard the jingle of harness.
“Trobhad a seo! Over here!” It wasn’t raining yet, but the air still held that strange, muffled quality and he felt as though he’d shouted through a pillow.
They heard him, though, and within a minute or two, they were on their way.
“Who is it we’re after, sir?” asked Anson McHugh, politely. The eldest of Tom McHugh’s sons, he’d come with his father and a younger brother, as well as the Lindsay brothers and a few others who lived close enough to get the summons in time.
“A band of black British soldiers,” Jamie told him.
“Black soldiers?” Anson asked, looking puzzled. “Is there such a thing, then?”
“There is,” Jamie assured him dryly. “Lord Dunmore—ye ken Lord Dunmore? Oh, ye don’t. Nay matter—he started it some years back by getting into a moil wi’ the Virginians he was meant to be governing. They wouldna do as he said, so he put out word that any slave who chose to join the army would be freed. And fed, clothed, and paid,” he added, thinking that this was more than most Continental soldiers could expect.
Anson nodded, his long young face serious. All the McHughs were serious, save their mother, Adeline—and God knew the woman needed a sense of humor, wi’ seven bairns, all boys.
“Is it treason we’re going to commit, then?” Anson asked. A faint gleam of excitement came into his eyes at the thought.
“Very likely,” Jamie said, and suppressed an inappropriate smile at the thought. He’d had a flash of memory: a contentious conversation between himself and John Grey, on a road in Ireland. Grey, annoyed by Jamie’s refusal to tell him what he knew about Tobias Quinn’s aims, had said, “I suppose it is frivolous to point out that assisting the King’s enemies—even by inaction—is treason.”
To which he had himself replied evenly, “It is not frivolous to point out that I am a convicted traitor. Are there judicial degrees of that crime? Is it additive? Because when they tried me, all they said was ‘treason’ before putting a rope around my neck.”
He was surprised to find that the inappropriate smile had crept onto his face despite the current urgent situation—and the fraught circumstances of the memory. A shout from Gillebride MacMillan made him turn sharply from Anson and kick his horse into the highest pace he could sustain on a slippery blanket of wet pine needles.
Panting with the hurry, they reached Gillebride, who silently pointed the way with his chin.
The soldiers had stopped by a small creek to water the horses; that was luck. He could see Ulysses standing on the near bank, leaning against a bare willow’s trunk, the drooping, leafless branches falling in a sort of cage about him.
Taking that as a good omen, Jamie gathered his men and made his aims known. He let Anson McHugh shout, “One … two … three!” and on that signal, the group split like a dropped egg, Gillebride and the McHughs going for the left flank, as it were, with himself and the Lindsays riding straight into the creek to split the group, and himself meaning to seize upon Ulysses—Kenny Lindsay to back him up, if needed.
“Make sure o’ the horses!” he shouted, leaning toward Kenny. “I dinna ken which one belongs to our man. It’s the saddlebags I want!”
“Aye, Mac Dubh,” Lindsay said, grinning, and Jamie let out a Highland whoop that made Phineas—unused to such a thing—swerve madly, ears laid back.
The black soldiers sprang up at once to defend themselves, but most of them were dismounted, and their horses hadn’t liked the screech any more than Phineas did. Ulysses had started from his willow tree like a water rat flushed by a fox, and dived for his tethered horse.
Jamie pulled his own horse up into a slithering stop amid a shower of wet leaves and flung himself off. He ran through the creek edge, ignoring rocks and the cold water that splashed his legs, and threw himself at Ulysses just as the man was getting his left foot into the stirrup. His blood was up and he dragged Ulysses away from the horse, shoved him, then punched him in the belly.
“Saddlebags!” he bellowed over his shoulder, and caught a glimpse of Kenny sliding off his own horse, preparing to make a run for the bags. The glimpse took his attention off his own business for a split second and Ulysses hit him hard on the ear and pushed him backward into the creek. The cold water surging up through his clothes was as much a shock as the startling pain in his ear, but he got enough breath back to roll over and scramble clumsily to his feet. There was the boom of a pistol shot at close range; Kenny had fired at Ulysses, but missed, and one of Ulysses’s men dived at Kenny from behind and took his legs out from under him.