"He would not. I am his best rifleman—after Eli Greenglove. He knows my value. And my honor as a soldier is worth more to me than fifty pieces of eight."
Crouching in the shrubbery, Auguste shook his head in wonder. There was some sense of right and wrong even among Raoul's rogues.
But that hadn't stopped Wegner from being one of the men who backed Raoul with his rifle this morning.
He waited for the men to cross the ridge. He heard no sound from the one who had fallen; he had probably taken his comrades' advice and gone to sleep.
When the lantern swung out of sight around a corner of the trading post palisade, Auguste darted forward. Keeping low, he made a wide circle through the wooded slope above Victor. He scrambled down to the road where the Hopkins house stood. A long-eared black dog barked and ran at him when he passed one of the houses along the road. His heart stopped as he waited for doors to fly open and rifles to fire at him. But he kept walking, and the dog stopped barking when he was beyond the house it was guarding.
Hoping none of the neighbors would hear him, he knocked loudly at the Hopkins door to wake them up.
Frank Hopkins, holding a candle in his hand, stood in the doorway in a long nightshirt. "What the devil is it? We've got a sick man in here—" He peered closer. "My God, Auguste! Get inside, quick."
He reached out, dragged Auguste through the door and shut it quickly behind him.
"I thought you were out at the Hales'." They stood in Frank's ground-floor workshop. The iron printing press towered shadowy in the candle's glow.
"I came to see Grandpapa. And—Frank, I'm going back to my people. I need your help."