Guns of Liberty (2 page)

“Still on edge,” Meeks purred. “Primed and ready to explode. I like that, yes. I have always liked you, Danny McQueen.”

“Sure you have. And pigs have wings,” Daniel said. Perhaps they shared a mutual respect for one another’s fighting ability, but affection—hardly.

“Now you wound me.” Meeks closed the door and dragged the high-backed chair over toward the bed. “Here I have paid your room and board for these many days. Well, no matter, at last I have arrived. And you did me the kindness of waiting. It has been a long time since Braddock’s Road. You were but a lad of thirteen then—but man enough, it is true. And then, there was that trouble with Ottawa and Pontiac. We are indeed old comrades in arms.” Meeks leaned forward and placed long fingers on his knobby knees. The Englishman, at forty, might look in need of a good meal, but Daniel had fought side by side with the man and knew there was uncommon strength in his hungry frame.

“I heard you had returned to London,” Daniel said.

“I never remain in one place for long. I follow the sound of battle. The smell of blood and powder smoke lured me as surely as the siren’s song did Ulysses. What do you follow, my friend?” Meeks removed a clay pipe from his pocket, filled it, and lit the contents of the bowl with the candle on the end table.

“I am not your friend.” Daniel lowered the pistols to the bed and kept them within easy reach on the quilt.

“Ah, the bitterness of the prodigal son,” the major said dryly. “You abandoned your father, but not the guilt, dear fellow. You have my sympathy.”

Daniel’s dark gray eyes flashed with anger. The major was treading precarious ground now. Daniel’s father, Brian Farley McQueen, had fled to the colonies after the defeat of the Jacobite uprising in Scotland. Of noble birth in his native land, Brian McQueen was reduced to a humble station in life. Relying on his talent with iron and forge, he opened a blacksmith shop on the outskirts of Boston. There Brian McQueen made a new life for himself. There he became a widower, losing his faithful wife to pneumonia, and there he raised his son, Daniel, and taught him to master the forge and the molten eye of fired metal. But Daniel was a headstrong lad born with a wanderlust. Twice he’d run away, the last time eleven years ago.

That was on the night of their quarrel, when Daniel, bitter over a lost love, had left to seek his fortune in the wild interior of the continent. After more than a decade of fighting, trapping, and living by his wits, those old arguments and resentments seemed petty now. Deep within, he yearned to see his father once again. Yet pride, and his own failure and a sense of being beyond his father’s forgiveness, had prevented his return to Massachusetts.

“Damn it, Major. The hell with your sympathy. Why did you send for me? And leave my father out of it.” Daniel climbed off the bed and stood, swaying slightly, in the middle of the floor.

“If only I could,” Meeks said.

“What does that mean? Enough of your game, I say.”

“Where do your loyalties lie, Danny boy—with the crown or with these treasonous rebels?”

“With myself.” Daniel glowered. “My father—”

“Rots aboard a prison ship in Boston Harbor. He had turned his forge into an armory for rebels and was arrested only a couple of days before the incident at Lexington.”

Meeks accurately read the puzzled expression on Daniel’s face and as succinctly as possible gave an account of the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord only ten days past. Daniel listened, incredulous that the patriots, as they called themselves, had taken up arms against British troops. He felt a stirring of pride in his heart, but that was quickly supplanted by concern for his father. Major Josiah Meeks wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of tracking him down just to give him news of his father.

“What of my father?”

“Brian Farley McQueen will hang for his seditious activities,” Meeks replied with a smile. “Unless, of course, he is pardoned for his misdeeds. You, my capable young friend, can win that pardon for him. And a pouch of gold for yourself.”

“How?” Daniel asked, his eyes narrowing.

“Come with me.” The major headed for the door. He didn’t bother to wait and see if Daniel would follow. The officer knew his man. Daniel hastily donned his greatcoat and pocketed his pistols. He had the distinct impression he was heading into more trouble than he had ever known.

Daniel and the British major darted from the doorway of the Cock’s Crow and out into the settling mist. A few quick steps across the lantern-lit alley and they reached the stable that serviced the boarders at the tavern. They waited in the doorway of the stable to allow their eyes to adjust to the gloomy interior. The hairs rose on the back of Daniel’s neck and his hand dropped to his coat pocket and closed around his gun.

“It will be dawn in a few hours. We can be well on our way by then,” Meeks said.

“We haven’t finished talking.” Daniel glanced aside. He stiffened, sensing a movement in the hidden reaches of the nearest stall.

“And you won’t,” a third party interjected. A person, unseen, spoke from the stall to the left of the doorway. Daniel recognized the voice in an instant. It could only belong to Justin Flambeau.

Movement up ahead! Then another voice …

“You in the cloak, this is none of your business. Leave us.” Sevier Flambeau materialized out of the shadowy interior of the stable and stepped into the pallid glare seeping through the open doorway. He blocked their path and brandished a dueling pistol that wavered from Daniel to the major.

“I am an officer in service to His Majesty—” Meeks began.

“Go now and live!” Sevier interrupted, shifting his stance.

Meeks turned toward Daniel. “I don’t suppose you can reimburse me for your tavern bill.”

“Not a shilling.”

“Then you must needs pay me in service.” Meeks sighed. “Sorry, lads, you cannot have him. Not yet, anyway.”

“You heard the major,” Daniel said. “Best you stand aside and let us see to our horses.”

The voyageur spat in the dirt at his feet and squared his bulky shoulders. He held his pistol level. His face, like his brother Justin’s, was round, and florid from too much drink. He was the eldest and knew he should have had more sense. Then again, his hands were still dirty from his brother’s freshly dug grave.

“Stand aside, is it,
mon ami
? Then make me.”

“As you say,” Daniel replied. There was a muffled explosion and fire spewed from his coat. A fraction of a second later the toe of Sevier’s right boot exploded in bits of leather and blood. Sevier howled and fired. Daniel was already in motion. He dropped and hurled himself into the shadow patch to his left and crashed into Justin as the other voyageur lunged forward with his knife. Daniel knocked Justin off his feet and scrambled atop the voyageur. He caught the man’s wrist, twisted until Justin dropped his knife. Then Daniel dragged him to his feet and flung the voyageur against the stable wall. Justin gasped for breath and charged forward.

It was Josiah Meeks who halted the voyageur in his tracks. The major stepped out of the shadows, his cloak billowing like the wings of a great bat as he swung an arm’s length of timber. The wood cracked in half across Justin’s skull and dropped him in his tracks.

Sevier moaned and cursed and rolled in the darkened aisle; he cradled his bloodied foot that was now absent a few toes. “I will kill you. One day, I swear—”

Daniel swung a well-placed kick and rendered the man unconscious.

“Bravo,” the British major said with a callous laugh. “A well-placed blow often speaks more eloquently than a timely retort.”

Daniel was anxious to quit this city before he met any more of Sevier Flambeau’s relatives. He hurriedly saddled his horse and led the animal out of its stall. The bay shied and was difficult to handle, made skittish by the fight and the smell of blood.

Justin groaned. Sevier began to mumble something, though neither man opened his eyes. That suited Daniel just fine. He ruefully examined his singed, blackened pocket and patted it once again to make sure all the embers were extinguished. Then he walked his horse out into the alley. It was a hell of a time to leave, so misty and dark and chillingly damp. Why was Meeks in so much of a hurry? He mounted, and a moment later the British major emerged from the stable and swung astride his own gray steed.

Daniel walked his bay a few steps forward to corner Josiah Meeks against the wall of the stable.

“What is this?” Meeks asked, frowning.

“An answer to my question, Englishman. How do I save my father from the hangman’s noose?”

“Ah. Simple. A life for a life. You must kill a man.”

“Who?”

Meeks smiled, but there was little humor in his single, baleful eye. “George Washington.”

May 10, 1775

“S
TAND AND DELIVER, OR
die in your tracks!” the tallest of the three highwaymen exclaimed. The black hood he wore muffled his voice; the black cloak concealed his long-limbed frame. Two more hooded figures, one to either side, held their saddle pistols at the ready.

“It would be a shame to splatter that pretty face and yellow hair o’yours all over the hickories,” a small, thickset thief added.

The third highwayman, a slim, red-eyed ruffian, sat silent, allowing his two companions to speak while his unwavering gaze swept the young woman’s pretty form from her slender white ankles at the hem of her cotton dress to her rounded hips and bosom. Curls the color of autumn meadows, yellow-gold in the waning of the year, poked out from beneath the tricorn hat she wore. Kate Bufkin was as fetching as moonlight on the Delaware River.

Young Kate endured the rascal’s lascivious appraisal and refused to be frightened into submission, though she was alone, twenty-two miles out from Philadelphia along the Trenton Road. Five miles ahead lay home and hearth, the safety of the inn she ran with her brother. It was noon and she’d been traveling since sunup, driving her four-wheeled wagon along the heavily rutted road. She was tired and thirsty. Her back ached; her homespun cotton dress was no longer blue but gritty with dust. And the eight large crates of Irish Brown Reds in the wagon had kept up a continuous complaint, squawking and flapping their wings every time the wagon jolted.

In short, Miss Kate Bufkin was in no mood to be trifled with—especially by the likes of these highwaymen.

“You’ll be stepping off that chicken wagon, there’s a good miss.” The small, thickset man brought himself around to the side of the wagon.

The third man broke his silence. He did not intend to share the favors of such a comely tavern wench with anyone. “Back off, Chaney,” he warned, closing in on the other side, leaving only their leader to obstruct her passage.

Kate gathered the lines in her left hand, caught up the whip in her right. With a flick of her wrist she laid open Chaney’s shoulder, then lashed out at the hooded man to her right and caught him along the neck.

He yelped and fired his gun. The sudden explosion startled the team. The mares bolted forward as the leader of the three highwaymen, his black cloak flapping, made a mad dash out of harm’s way. He raised his pistol and fired. Kate flinched, sucked in a lungful of powder smoke, and wondered how the man could have missed.

She did not intend to give him another chance. She cracked her whip across the rumps of her mares and urged them to even greater effort. In a matter of seconds she had raced past the thieves. The wagon lurched to one side, clipped a tree trunk someone had only partly dragged out of the road. The chickens renewed their protests at such ill treatment.

The highwaymen brought their horses under control and gave chase. Another pistol shot sounded as Kate glanced over her shoulder and saw the highwaymen a couple of hundred feet back. They’d easily catch her; she was pulling too great a load. She gave a momentary thought to lightening the wagon. But there was no time. Besides, she was loath to part with any of her property without a fight.

Kate reached under the bench seat and brought the blunderbuss secreted there up beside her on the bench seat.

The Trenton Road followed the Delaware River as it wound through the hills. Kate could just glimpse the sun-dappled water. The land was heavily forested, garbed in the green foliage of spring. She sped past maple and hickory, white oak and ash, whose leafy limbs stretched above the road to form a ceiling of intersecting branches. The wagon careened through a patchwork of sunlight and shadow as it approached the covered bridge across Half Mile Creek. It was downhill here, and the wagon made good speed. But it was small comfort to Kate. The incline beyond the bridge might prove her undoing; it would surely dissipate her lead. Still, Kate vowed that blood would flow before such brigands laid a hand on her.

Several white-tailed deer dashed from the forest’s edge and cleared the road as the wagon rushed by. Two boys near the covered bridge paused to lean upon their fishing poles and watch the oncoming wagon as it sped downhill toward them. Kate could not risk the lives of innocents in making her stand at the creek. Her next choice became Indian Head Rock at the top of the next hill. Here the road was bordered by cherry trees to one side and on the other a boulder twice as large as the wagon. The massive gray stone resembled the profile of an Indian, silently guarding the road.

At the rock, then, she would make her stand. Such a course was well clear of the youngsters at the bridge. Even now the lads began to wave until the guns of the highwaymen barked their warning of death in the afternoon. The youths dropped their rods and pails and dove for the creek bed at the sound of the guns. In their haste they left a line of freshly caught perch to die along the road.

The wagon rumbled onto the bridge; the iron-rimmed wheels made a tremendous clatter as they rolled over the weathered planks. The interior of the covered bridge offered a momentary respite from the sun. It might have been nice to pause awhile and enjoy the moment had there not been a trio of armed men trying to kill her.

The horses started to slacken their pace, but Kate cracked her whip and stung the rumps of her frightened team.