done nothing but break the stick. But if she added a bit of momentum and velocity to it...
She spun in a circle, holding her innocent stick away from her body, then pulling it in a little just before it smacked the cocky Scot across the nose. He’d ducked right into it. The stick broke, of course, but before it did, it gave the big man’s nose one hell of a whack. She was pretty sure it wasn’t just the stick that broke.
He cried out and stumbled back. His eyes were pinched tight. His hand reached for his gun at his back. It was too late to try to push him to the ground and wrestle him for it. She just had to run and hope there were some trees between them by the time he could see straight.
“Get back here, Bell! Ye’re a lot safer with me than ye are out there!”
Safe? With a killer? Hah!
Deep and deeper into birch trees she flew, her feet barely touching the ground. When the grasses gave way to rocks, she had no choice but to slow. She struck out east, hoping to avoid those men that had supposedly been tracking her every move before. McKiller kept hollering at her, but it didn’t sound like he’d even left the road yet. The first time she’d dared look back, he’d still been holding his nose and groping the air with his free hand.
"Juliet! I'll not go back without ye. Do ye hear? And ye're going to stick out like a sore thumb. I'll know exactly where to find ye. And this time, I'm going to truss ye up like a pig and hang ye from a pole! Do ye hear?"
"Thanks for the pointers," she said softly as she ran. First thing on the wish list would be a change of clothes.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
After about an hour, Jules rested in a clearing full of tall grass and wildflowers. It was so tempting to lie down and sleep, but sleep wasn’t even close to the top of that list. Clothing had slipped to number three, after water and food. It was when she lifted her eyes from the tempting flower bed that she first saw the smoke. A nice, focused trail of it lifting into the sky.
"Civilization. Hallelujah." She headed straight for it.
Sounds of industry reached her ears just as she noticed her feet were following a path through the trees. A lovely little stream came next, where she bent down and drank her fill. Soon, both water and path led her to a thatched house with a water wheel on its side. The wheel had little scoops on it, just a bit deeper than a paddle, more shallow than a bucket—about the size of frying pans. It might not be used for harnessing any energy at the moment, but it was doing a fine job lifting water from the stream and dumping it into a trough at the roofline of the house.
Somebody was thinkin'.
She wondered if the woman who lived in the little house might be a laundress considering the long lines of clothes at the other end of the house. Either that, or a few dozen people lived there among the little cluster of buildings. The yard was still in deep morning shadows, thanks to the giant oak trees that surrounded the place, so Jules felt brave enough to scurry to the clothes on the line, to see if they were dry, hoping her dark coat and jeans wouldn’t draw any attention.
She was grasping the hem of a plaid wool skirt when she realized she was being watched.
Shit!
A woman stood at the corner of the house, shaking her head. She wore a solid blue dress with a plaid pinafore over the top and an apron on the front. Catching someone about to steal from her clothesline didn’t seem to alarm her, but she was suggesting, rather strongly, that Jules not do it.
Jules put her hands behind her back.
The woman motioned for the would-be thief to follow her.
Why on earth would Jules follow her? Was this one of those centuries where thieves had their hands cut off?
But then again, why on earth shouldn’t she? The woman looked harmless enough. And it wasn’t as if she or her hands might end up as the meat in someone’s giant pot of stew.
Jules shook off the Hansel and Gretel images and followed the woman around the corner of the house where she stood with a door open, pointing inside while