Guns of Liberty (4 page)

Loyal was a man of medium height. He was fair-skinned like his sister. His once attractive features were marred by a flattened nose and flared nostrils. When he spoke, his voice carried the dry, nasal huskiness of a man given to breathing through his mouth. He stood and placed his fists on the oaken table and stared off across the empty tavern as if he were hearing war drums emanating from behind the walnut bar, where the inn’s supply of libations were neatly arranged in bottle, keg and jug.

The inn’s only paying residents were a joiner and a parson, and both of them had retired upstairs to the only two serviceable rooms. The tavern itself had six long tables and benches and a number of high-backed chairs arranged about the fireplace. The walls were decorated with a series of paintings depicting incidents from the Old Testament: David and Goliath, Daniel in the lion’s den, and Solomon rendering judgment. The whale-oil lanterns burning directly overhead illuminated the immediate area. The rest of the room was awash in dancing shadows.

Daniel lowered his pewter mug of Dutch beer and looked over at Kate. He had worked alongside Loyal all afternoon. The man had hardly spoken, offering only a friendly greeting and a comment about the weather, that it had been a cool spring but he was expecting a warm summer. Yet there was a haunted cast to the man’s features; though he was roughly the same age as Daniel, he moved like a much older man. His gestures were deliberate and measured, as if requiring a momentary rumination before committing himself to action. Daniel had known such men before, veterans of battle who carried the horror inside. Such men often sought the solitude of the howling wilderness or lived among their own kind yet isolated, eventually going mad.

“I heard nothing,” Daniel told him.

“Have you no ears?” Loyal stood, knocking the chair over. He circled the table and hurried to one of the shuttered windows in the front of the tavern. He peered through a firing port and studied the moonlit courtyard.

“Come to dinner, brother Loyal.” Kate’s soft voice reached across the empty room.

Loyal glanced around at his sister. Her gentle, reasoning tone cut through the heart of his panic and brought him back to reality. His vision cleared; his bunched and worried features relaxed. He placed a hand upon the strong, solid walls alongside him and, just to be sure, cocked an eye toward a water barrel he kept filled to the brim to guard against the flaming arrows of an Indian attack should one occur, a remote possibility at best. This was settled, civilized country now, and the dangers here originated among white men, not red.

“We used to live in the north country, near Fort Detroit,” Kate recounted. “During the Ottawa uprising, our farm was burned. My father and Loyal were captured by Chief Pontiac. Loyal saw my father tortured to death. Then the Ottawa stripped my brother naked and set him free. They intended to hunt him for amusement. But he escaped them and hid until the rebellion was crushed. I was only five, but I still remember the way he looked when he stumbled into Fort Detroit, more dead than alive.”

Kate’s voice drifted off as Loyal straightened his chair and took his place at the head of the table.

“A fine meal, sister,” Loyal commented. “I’m in your debt, McQueen. If it weren’t for the presence of an unattached male visitor I’d be slopping hard bread and porridge.”

Kate blushed. “How you talk so.”

“It’s true.” After good-naturedly defending his statement, Loyal threw back his head and laughed heartily. Only when he had filled his plate did he grow serious. “So Kate has taken you on, eh? What talents have you—can you work with wood?”

“I’m no stranger to it. And smithing was the trade of my father.” Daniel paused. The way he had said it made it sound as if his father were dead. That made him sick at heart and brought to the fore just why he had come to the Hound and Hare and why he must continue to stay until Meeks said differently.

“Is your father deceased?” Kate asked.

“I hear he’s in a poor way,” Daniel said.

“Then shouldn’t you attend him?”

“I can help him more right where I am.” Daniel noted the look of confusion on the girl’s face. “What I mean is—my father has … well, we quarreled. And I have not seen him for a long time.”

“That seems hardly reason enough.”

“Sister!” Loyal interrupted. “It is Mr. McQueen’s affair and none of ours. Pass the butter, please.”

Kate fumed in silence. She forced herself to eat, though it was in her nature to belabor a matter. Her mother had once claimed young Kate Bufkin would argue with a fencepost.

She changed her attitude and the subject and tried a different tactic. “You’re right. Anyway, if Mr. McQueen leaves I’d have to contend with Henk Schraner all over again.”

The fare was as good as Daniel had ever eaten, and he paid Kate Bufkin that very compliment. She might be brash and headstrong, but he liked that in a woman. If he had stumbled onto the Hound and Hare Inn all on his lonesome, he would have counted himself a fortunate man and made the most of the situation. But he was here under pretense, a trickster who had stolen his way in among good people. Such thoughts as these dampened the pleasure to be found in the presence of the comely lass he had “rescued.”

The barn was dark and smelled of rotting straw, of leather, and of horses from their stalls at the rear of the structure. Daniel had mounded hay in a stall close to the front door. The barn also housed a forge where the north wall had been extended to contain it. A smaller set of doors opened onto the smithy. Daniel noted that the bellows and furnace were well constructed and adequate to handle such repairs as the inn required.

Brian McQueen’s smithy was twice as large as this shop.
Aye, Father
would
have called this small forge a toy,
Daniel thought. And what would he call his son? Assassin? Traitor? Certainly not a savior, even though the irascible old Highlander would be spared a jig at the end of a British rope due to his son’s actions. Brian McQueen wouldn’t see it that way, and he’d say as much. A man either did wrong or he did right, but never just the
best one could do at the moment.
There were no shades of gray on his father’s palette. The old Scotsman’s intractability had erected a wall between them. Yet Daniel loved the man, despite the years and the distance. He would do what he must to save him.

Straw crackled underfoot. Daniel tensed and dropped his hand to one of the “Quakers” at his side. A woman’s silhouette appeared in the barn door, backlit by a moon that floated like a pearl in an obsidian sea. Kate Bufkin held up a lantern, its flame turned too low to dispel the shadows. She raised the wick, and the fire within the glass flue blossomed. Daniel’s red mane shown between the rails of the stall to her right. The night air carried a chill, and she had wrapped herself in a shawl. The hem of her linsey-woolsey nightshirt fluttered a few inches above the earth. The gusting breeze felt good on her calves.

She stood over him, a folded woolen blanket in hand.

“The nights are cool still.”

“I am in your debt, Kate.” He stood and spread the blanket over the straw he had mounded for a bed.

“Maybe I wanted to see if you’re still here. You might have slipped away and taken my mares.”

“Is that what you thought?”

“Maybe.” Her lips were upturned in a
₍
teasing smile. “I will tell you something, Daniel. My mother was a dutiful wido … for a while. And afterward when we moved to New York and she took a position as a nanny and teacher …” Kate’s story trailed off as she realized how much she was revealing to this newcomer. Yet she felt she could trust him. “My mother was not a patient person,” the young woman said, lowering her voice. “Neither am I.”

Kate started back to the inn. Daniel watched her go, wondering what she had meant. It was too much puzzlement for one night. He stretched out, settled back in the straw, and went to sleep.

It was a familiar dream recalling the past. The years drifted away and Daniel was once again a ten-year-old boy riding his father’s broad shoulders as Brian Farley McQueen strolled along the edge of the fairgrounds following a crowd of onlookers toward the finish line of the race. To young Daniel peering over the adults, it seemed most of the townspeople had the same idea. The riders had left half an hour ago, racing toward Boston proper three miles beyond the first low hills. A column of dust in the distance signaled the participating riders were on their way back. Six of the fastest horses in Massachusetts were competing for a fine new carriage that Brian McQueen had been commissioned to build. The race was the highlight of the fair. Young Daniel could feel the tension in the air, and as the horsemen came into view, the boy began to kick his heels against his father’s shoulders.

“Easy, lad. I’m no racehorse,” Brian said, wincing with every blow. Daniel clutched his father’s hair and pointed.

“I see them, Father! The black is in the lead, just like you said she’d be.”

“Of course.” Brian McQueen grinned. He tried to find a suitable spot for himself among the crowd. Being a man of compact build, he craned his bull neck and raised up on his toes to peer past the shoulders of the men and women blocking his path. Suddenly, the crowd shifted. He saw a gap, made his move, and wormed his way to the fore. He lifted Daniel off his shoulders so as not to anger the crowd behind him.

Daniel cheered for the black mare that had held the lead since the start of the race. The sleek, swift animal was a frequent guest in the stable where Brian McQueen kept his blacksmith shop. Squire Trevane often boarded the animal at the smithy. Trevane was a well-to-do landowner whose estate holdings had been purchased with the profits from his shipping business in Boston.

Trevane knew horses, and the black mare was as fine a specimen of horseflesh as Brian or his son had ever seen. Young Daniel had grown to consider the black mare as much his as the squire’s, so he cheered and waved the horse on as if he were its rightful owner.

Even in his dream, Daniel could smell the sweat and the dust and feel the press of the adults around him as the crowd became more animated and surged closer to the finish line. Townsmen and fanners shouted till they were hoarse and pummeled the air with their fists. The ground trembled underfoot. The horses loomed large, their manes flowing and hooves churning the dirt.

“Yes,” Daniel shouted. “C’mon, Lady Jane. C’mon.” His voice was drowned out by the din of adults. He didn’t care. He was certain Lady Jane recognized him in the crowd. He was certain she would win just for him, the boy who groomed her and always brought her treats from the garden.

In a thunder of drumming hooves and a blur of motion, the pack of horses crossed the finish line, the black mare leading by a length. The race concluded in a bedlam of wild cheers and an onrush of people carrying tankards of ale to the riders. Brian McQueen guided his son through the throng and out onto the meadow, where the dust still settled in the wake of the racing steeds. And there the dream unfolded its captured memory. Big, blond-haired Jonah Starbuck, whose stallion had been unable to overtake the black mare, laid the wooden handle of his whip across the nose and neck of his mount. The animal neighed in terror and tried to break free, but Jonah Starbuck held fast the reins and the stallion received blow after blow from its furious owner. Starbuck stood a head taller than any of the men around him, and his mercurial temper and powerful physique had won for him the respect and fear of the townsmen. None approved of his conduct. None made a move to stop the woodsman from punishing the unfortunate beast, until Brian McQueen left his son in the meadow, walked up behind Starbuck, and cried out, “Enough.”

The ill-tempered bully fumed and glared at the smaller man standing before him. He allowed the stallion’s reins to slip through his fingers.

“Well, blacksmith, is it for you to teach me how to deal with what is mine?” the big man said, hands on his hips.

“It appears someone must,” Brian replied calmly.

Starbuck tilted back his head and laughed so hard his belly shook and the brass buckle in his belt bobbed up and down. Then he took the whip by its handle and uncoiled seven feet of braided oxhide. The townsmen and farmers milling about the other horses fell silent.

“Come, little ‘teacher,’ you’ve a lesson to learn, by my oath.”

Brian advanced on the woodsman. The whip snaked out, caught his ankles, and dropped Brian in his tracks. He rolled over and scrambled to his feet, and Starbuck laid the blacksmith’s back open with two quick lashes; Brian groaned and dropped to his knees, fought the tears and the white-hot pain searing his bloody shoulders beneath his tattered shirt. The whip lashed out twice more as Brian whirled about to face his attacker. Streaks of crimson crisscrossed his neck and chest.

“No!” Daniel shouted, and grabbed a rock and hurled it at the woodsman. The stone glanced off Starbuck’s knee. The bully groaned as he faced this second threat. He spied the boy, scowled, and cocked his hand; the whip trailed along the grass behind him.

“Insolent whelp,” Starbuck growled. “I’ll give you a taste of my lash.” He advanced on the ten-year-old, momentarily forgetting the blacksmith until the bully heard footsteps and swung about, intending to catch Brian McQueen by the neck. But Daniel’s rock had provided the necessary diversion. Bloody but escaping the grasp of the whip, Brian darted inside the big man’s guard and wrapped the woodsman in a rib-cracking bear hug. Arms made strong and hard from a life of lifting anvils and loading pig iron and wielding “Thor’s” hammer locked at the small of Starbuck’s back and tightened.

Jonah Starbuck wriggled and moaned. He tried to pummel the smaller man, but every time the bully lifted his fist, the blacksmith increased the pressure. Breathing became the foremost thing in Starbuck’s mind. Daniel watched in awe as Jonah Starbuck’s rawboned form seemed to shrink in on itself and—when Brian released his hold—fell limply to the green grass.

Then Brian returned to his son, oblivious of the staring crowd. Blood seeped from his lacerated shoulders. The whip had cut a livid gash along his neck.

“Father, you’re hurt,” young Daniel said, the voice echoing in his mind now.