“Even though he was simply attempting to protect his wife.”
Richmond gave a little laugh. “Whether she was wife or no, as I said, we couldn’t understand a sound the savage made. And our party was attempting to bring out a Red Indian with the blessing of Your Lordship, the governor.” Buchan suppressed a grunt of dissatisfaction and Richmond said, “They got all in a roke then, both of them shouting, John Senior rhyming off the oaths. And the Indian grabbed him by the throat and commenced to choking him.”
“That’s when you and Mr. Taylor stepped in?”
Richmond nodded his head.
“Was there no other course of action open to you? There were eight of you to face a single Indian.”
Richmond said, “The facts are the facts and I regret your disliking them, sir. But dislike is not enough to alter the past. He was nearly as large as myself, an awful length of a brute. He had hold of a seventy-year-old man and was not about to give him up. Tom Taylor and I laid onto him with the butts of our rifles and we battered him about the head, but he would not relent.” He paused and considered the officer observing him. “A curious thing it is to me, sir, that you are more concerned with the death of this Indian than the murder of your own men on that selfsame lake.”
“Your curiosity,” Buchan said slowly, “is irrelevant.”
“And is the curiosity of those men you’ve got standing outside the door irrelevant?”
More than likely then, Buchan guessed, he had not been sleeping when they arrived.
Richmond said, “Odds of fifty years now, John Senior and his like have been fighting for this shore. You know yourself there’s been deaths on both sides. And you thought going up the river to hand out a few blankets would take the savage out of that lot.”
“I had hopes we might change their view of us.”
“You hoped to have the governor kiss your heroic little arse.”
“Mr. Richmond —”
“I know your kind.”
“Mr. Richmond —”
“You’d fuck your own mother if the King gave the order.”
“Mr. Richmond!”
He sat up at mock attention. “Sir,” he shouted.
Buchan gripped his tunic at the waist and pulled it straight. He wanted to take the pistol from his belt and shoot from inches away, to blow the man’s nose through the back of his head.
Corporal Rowsell stuck his head in the doorway. “Captain, sir,” he said.
Buchan raised his hand without turning his head. He waved the corporal back outside. He said, “You shot the Indian, Mr. Richmond, is that correct?”
“John Peyton ordered us to get the Indian off his father, yes. I stepped away and used my rifle. I shot him once in the back at close range and even then we had to pry his hands free of John Senior’s neck.”
“After the Indian had been shot, what did you do?”
“Sir, we collected spruce branches and covered the corpse on the ice, sir.”
“The second Indian. What became of him?”
“He run off, to the best of my knowledge.”
“No additional shots were fired?”
Richmond turned his head to look at the officer. “Not that I recall, sir, no.”
“And then what?”
“We spent the night in one of the Indian wigwams, sir. We collected our belongings what had been stole from John Peyton’s boat. We carried the Indian woman down the river to the Peyton house along with a quantity of furs we felt we had some claim to by way of compensation for losses.”
“Was there any contact with other Indians on the way down the river?”
“Not of the Red persuasion, no.”
“Of which persuasion then?”
Richmond rapped the knuckles of one hand against the tabletop. “A Micmac trapper is all.”
“Does this trapper have a name?”
“Noel Young.”
“You knew this man?”
“Everyone on the shore knows Noel Young. He kipped down with us for the night and we went our separate ways in the morning.”
Buchan nodded and made a note in the journal. “Did the woman come down the river willingly?”
“She did not say, that I recall, one way or the other.”
“In your opinion,” Buchan said. “Based on your observations.”
Richmond settled back into his habitual slump. “She had little choice in the matter, now, did she?”
“She tried twice to escape, is that right?”
“Twice she took a stroll into the woods at an hour that might lead one to see it as an attempt to run off. Perhaps she meant to take care of some delicate business and lost her way.”
Buchan tapped his pencil against the page.
“We had the governor’s blessing to take a Red Indian back from the lake,” Richmond said again.
“But not, I believe, to murder two men in the process.”
Richmond leaned back from the table as far as his chair allowed.
“The second Indian on the ice. I don’t believe you were the shooter, Mr. Richmond, there would hardly have been time to reload.”
“He run off,” Richmond said.