He felt as if the arrow he'd been expecting and fearing all day had finally struck him.
There are no ghosts.
But Auguste couldn't be alive. He'd been shot to death at Old Man's Creek.
Was this what killing Pierre's squaw had brought on him?
The man before him had gone hungry for a long time. His almost skull-like face was a chilling reminder of the woman whose throat Raoul had slashed. But his gauntness also made him look more like Pierre than ever before. His buckskin leggings, like those of the Indians Raoul had just killed, were dirty and full of rips and holes. But the pale scar line running down his cheek, and those five parallel scars on his bare chest, left Raoul in no doubt who this was. Auguste's dark eyes burned at Raoul, alight with a fierce hatred.
The sergeant pulled Auguste by the arm. As the mongrel turned, Raoul suddenly saw that the middle of his ear was missing, the empty space bordered by partly healed red flesh.
Stunned speechless, Raoul looked at Levi and Armand, who stared back at him. They couldn't speak either. They were just as shaken.
Still burning at Taylor's high-and-mighty dismissal of him, Raoul was staggered by the shock of this meeting. But he saw one thing clear. All right, Auguste was still alive. That meant Raoul's revenge on the Sauk was not complete. Auguste was a traitor. Auguste was a murderer. And Raoul was going to work day and night to get him hanged.