Days of Gold (Edilean 2)

THE AMERICAN FRONTIER

1770

FOUR YEARS LATER

20

HARCOURT,” COLONEL WELLMAN said, “I want you to find my daughter’s... I hate to say it, her fiancé. The damned fool got himself kidnapped by the Indians.”

“Which ones?” Angus asked.

“Which ones what?” the colonel snapped.

“Which tribe of Indians?”

“How the hell would I know? The savages are your job, not mine. All I know is that the idiot boy has disappeared, and my daughter is crying herself to sleep every night. Tell me, Harcourt, do you understand women?”

“Not in the least,” Angus said honestly.

“I offered my daughter a man, but she’d rather have a worthless boy like Matthew Aldredge. When I heard that the coach he was on had been attacked, I was tempted to tell her the boy was dead. But she was there when I heard, so she knew the truth.”

Angus didn’t reply to what the colonel was saying. He’d learned early on that it was better to never give his opinion to anyone in the army, and especially not to an arrogant blowhard like Colonel Wellman. But since Angus wasn’t in the army, Wellman felt he could talk to him freely. This consisted of hours of Angus having to listen to Wellman’s lectures on everything from food to horse care to how everyone should run his own life.

Wellman’s only weakness was his pretty young daughter, Betsy. According to him, she was virtuous, demure, and needed constant protection. The truth was that she was a self-centered little hussy who used her father’s rank to threaten any man who tried to say no to her. Twice she’d come on to Angus. The first time he was polite, but the second time he said he’d take her to the captain and tell him the truth. After that, she left him alone.

The men who took her up on her offers lived in fear of being found out by her father. In the three years that Angus had been at the fort, Betsy had tearfully accused two young men of having made inappropriate advances to her. The truth was that she’d made the men’s lives hell. At first, they’d loved the insatiable desires of the girl, but when she began to make them late for drills, when she would crawl into the barrack’s window at 3 A.M. and cry that he didn’t love her anymore, the men tried to break it off. The girl then told her father a pack of lies, and the young men were sent off on some dangerous mission. Neither of them had returned alive.

But that was all before Captain Austin came to the fort. He was short, stocky, ugly, and mean, and he didn’t believe in mercy or leniency. He was fresh from England, descended from generations of soldiers, and to him there was only one way to do things: his way. But after Austin caught Betsy slipping about the post in the wee hours of the night, he put a stop to it. He told her father that his daughter was so beautiful he feared that she’d have her virtue taken by one of the Americans. Iron bars were put over her bedroom window. When Betsy started making eyes at a handsome young soldier newly arrived from North Carolina, Austin saw to it that the man was transferred.

The whole escapade greatly amused both the soldiers and the Watchers, as the four men who served as guides for the fort were called.

But it was a shock to all of them when Colonel Wellman told someone that he wanted his daughter to marry Captain Austin. As for Betsy, she told anyone who’d stand still that she’d rather marry the devil.

Now, Angus was hearing that young Betsy had an English fiancé. Angus’s first thought was “poor man.”

“He’s worthless!” Colonel Wellman said. “Utterly without value. He’s the youngest son of a rich man, but he’ll receive nothing. Not a dime. And, he plans to become a clergyman. Can you imagine my daughter as the wife of a minister?”

Angus thought it was better not to answer that question. As always, Wellman had on his full uniform, red jacket and all. It was joked that the uniform was his skin. “Like a tattoo” was the consensus.

As for Angus, he was wearing the gear of a frontiersman. It was all deerskin, light, supple, and it protected him from the elements, as he spent most of his time out of doors. His job as a Watcher was to see that the borders were respected. The greedy American settlers weren’t to encroach on the territory the government said belonged to the Indians, and the Indians weren’t to destroy the property or the lives of the settlers. And too, there were a few angry Frenchmen still hanging around. The French and Indian War had ended eight years before, but there were still Frenchmen who believed that the land west of the Allegheny Mountains belonged to them.

“You want me to find her fiancé?” Angus asked.

“Yes. No. She wants him, but I don’t. Why would a spunky girl like my Betsy want an effeminate, worthless, cowardly—?” He waved his hand. “Captain Austin said he’d been taken west of here, so find the boy. Or, better yet, bring back his body. Take some men and go get whatever you can find that’s left of him. Men like him don’t survive long out here.”

“Mac, Connor, and Welsch,” Angus said quickly. Most of the soldiers were English, but Mac was from the Highlands of Scotland, while Connor and Welsch had been born in America. Mac—Alexander McDowell—at thirty-six, was the oldest enlisted man. He’d been promoted for valor many times, but he’d been demoted for insolence an equal number of times. Right now he was down to corporal, and from the way Austin had been eyeing him, he’d soon be a private. T. C. Connor and Naphtali Welsch were young, new, and handsome. And they were already being targeted by Betsy, which meant that, without help, their lives wouldn’t last long.

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; At the names, Wellman gave Angus a sharp look. “Sure you don’t want to take some more experienced men than those last two?”

“Sure of it,” Angus said but didn’t explain further.

Wellman gave Angus a hard look, as though trying to figure out what was in his mind, but then he turned away. Angus wasn’t a soldier and he wasn’t English so, to Wellman’s mind, there was no possibility of understanding him.

Angus waited patiently for the man to say he was dismissed. He well knew that the colonel was a stickler for obeying orders, and Angus did the best he could to stay out of trouble. Most of the time, taking orders stuck in his throat, but he didn’t want to cause anyone to look into his background and find out about an Angus McTern who was wanted for kidnapping and theft.

“What are you waiting for?” Wellman said, as though Angus were standing around from idleness.