An Echo in the Bone by Diana Gabaldon Read Free Book Online Page A

wife and left the Ridge—but it had never been more than a hope. Arch Bug was a Grant by blood, and clan Grant were a vengeful lot.
    The Frasers of Glenhelm had caught Arch Bug on their lands some fifty years before, and given him the choice: lose an eye or the first two fingers of his right hand. The man had come to terms with his crippled hand, turning from the bow he could no longer draw to the use of an ax, which he wielded and threw with a skill equal to any Mohawk’s, despite his age.
    What he had not come to terms with was the loss of the Stuart cause and the loss of the Jacobite gold, sent too late from France, rescued—or stolen, depending on your view of things—by Hector Cameron, who had brought one third of it to North Carolina, this share then stolen—or retrieved—from Cameron’s widow in turn by Arch Bug.
    Nor had Arch Bug come to terms with Jamie Fraser.

    “Is it threat, d’ye think?” Ian asked. They had moved away from the cabin, but kept to the trees, circling the large clearing where the Big House had been. The chimney and half a wall still stood, charred and bleak against the dirty snow.
    “I canna think so. If it was threat he meant, why wait until now?” Still, he gave silent thanks that his daughter and her weans were safely gone. There were worse threats than a dead pig, and he thought Arch Bug would not hesitate to make them.
    “Perhaps he left,” Ian suggested. “To see his wife settled, and he’s only now come back.”
    It was a reasonable thought—if there was one thing in the world Arch Bug loved, it was his wife, Murdina, his helpmate of more than fifty years.
    “Perhaps,” Jamie said. And yet … And yet he’d felt eyes on his back more than once in the weeks since the Bugs had left. Felt silence in the forest that was not the silence of the trees and rocks.
    He didn’t ask whether Ian had looked for the ax-wielder’s track; if one could be found, Ian would have found it. But it hadn’t snowed in more than a week, and what was left on the ground was patchy and trodden by the feet of innumerable people. He looked up at the sky; snow again, and soon.
    He made his way up a small outcrop, careful among the ice; the snow was melting in the day, but the water froze again at night, hanging from the cabin’s eaves and from every branch in glittering icicles that filled the forest with the light of blue dawn, then dripped gold and diamonds in the rising sun. Now they were colorless, tinkling like glass as his sleeve brushed the twigs of an ice-covered bush. He stopped, crouching at the top of the outcrop, looking down across the clearing.
    All right. The certainty that Arch Bug was here had set off a chain of half-conscious deductions, the conclusion of which now floated to the top of his mind.
    “He’d come again for one of two reasons,” he said to Ian. “To do me harm—or to get the gold.
    All of it.”
    He’d given Bug a chunk of gold when he’d sent the man and his wife away, upon the discovery of the Bugs’ treachery. Half a French ingot, it would have allowed an elderly couple to live the rest of their lives in modest comfort. But Arch Bug was not a modest man. He’d once been tacksman to the Grant of Grant, and while he’d hidden his pride for a time, it was not the nature of pride to stay buried.
    Ian glanced at him, interested.
    “All of it,” he repeated. “So ye think he hid it here—but somewhere he couldna get it easily when ye made him go.”
    Jamie lifted one shoulder, watching the clearing. With the house now gone, he could see the steep trail that led up behind it, toward the place where his wife’s garden had once stood, safe behind its deer-proof palisades. Some of the palisades still stood, black against the patchy snow.
    He would make her a new garden one day, God willing.
    “If his purpose was only harm, he’s had the chance.” He could see the butchered pig from here, a dark shape on the path, shadowed by a wide pool of blood.

    He pushed