Guns of Liberty Read Online Free PDF

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