Dubious Allegiance by Don Gutteridge Read Free Book Online

still in position.” A bullet struck the post behind Marc and sent splinters of it flying about his head. “We can’t stay in here anyway.”
    â€œAll right, out the door it is,” Hilliard said with customary bravura, but his lower lip was trembling like a child resisting tears. Neither man looked over at the bloody corpse.
    They rose together, bent low. Hilliard pushed the splintered door open and dashed boldly out into the mêlée. Marc was a step behind him. Hilliard skidded on the greasy snow and tumbled forward. Unable to stop, Marc tripped and landed beside him. Some part of Marc wanted to laugh at such a boyish pratfall, at the shared embarrassment of two playful companions at ease with their giddiness. He rolled over and came nose to nose with Rick.
    â€œSo far, so good,” he heard himself say, with a barely suppressed giggle. Was he going mad? Was this the evidence of battle fatigue?
    Rick, too, had a funny look on his face, as if he were about to tell a joke but had just forgotten it. “I think I’ve been hit,” he said.
    â€œJesus! Where?” Marc pulled himself up over Hilliard, who had turned partway onto his back. Shouts and explosions roared wildly, randomly, insanely about them.
    â€œDown here. I can feel . . .” Suddenly, Rick’s eyes began to close, like a slow curtain at the end of a melodrama. His mouth hung open, waiting for the word that did not reach it. His head lolled back, and he lay still.
    Paying no heed to the murderous fire around him, Marcleaned over Rick, pulled his jacket open, and lay an ear against his chest. He heard a heartbeat: faint but steady. Against his own rising panic, he poked blindly about below Hilliard’s waist till he felt the sticky ooze of blood. Rick had been hit somewhere in the bowel or groin. And he was bleeding profusely.
    Marc took a moment to survey his situation. It was quickly apparent that the assault had bogged down again. Most of the rebels appeared to have been pushed back into the fortified environs of the stone house, but with their backs to the wall, as it were, they were now raining a deadly and persistent fire upon the exposed regulars, who were hopelessly battered from the effort required to get this far. He saw Major Markham being dragged onto a stretcher. Marc’s own squad were scattered and now leaderless. He knew where his duty lay.
    But he did not go there. Instead, he picked up the unconscious body of his friend as gently as he could, laid it across his right shoulder, and began to trot back down towards the coulee, and the surgeon’s tent. He had taken only ten paces or so before he had to stop, drop to one knee, and catch his breath.
    Somewhere behind him a tumultuous shout rose above the roar of battle. Marc turned to see where it had come from. Could it be Colonel Wetherall arriving from Chambly with reinforcements? Were they to be saved at the eleventh hour?
    From the woods near the distillery several hundred fresh rebel troops came running across a ploughed field and a pasture, howling like Iroquois on a rampage. At the same time a second force materialized out of the bottomland along the river, threatening the cannon nearby. The defenders in the stone house had decided it was time to counterattack. But itwas the approach of the group from the woods that brought Marc upright and incredulous. There wasn’t a single gun amongst them. They were armed with pitchforks, axe-handles, and mattocks—and a fury fueled by hunger, humiliation, and the knowledge that some kinds of death are more necessary than others.
    Suddenly, cries of “Fall back!” could be heard, faintly, from the lips of officers. Men were scampering backwards past Marc. He picked up Hilliard as he would a child, and joined them, Rick’s breath still warming his right cheek.
    Moments later, a bugle sounded the unthinkable: three hundred British regulars—heirs to the reflected glories of