3
The head arrived the next morning. An Abenaki warrior ran up to the battlements beside the Ursule Redoubt in the west, threw it over the wall, and ran away.
“Shoot that bugger!” the duty sergeant ordered. With the reports of their muskets flat in the sullen cold, three men fired, but none of the shots came close.
The head rolled on the ground and lay still, staring upward through the hollow pits that had once been eyes, with the nose, ears, scalp and lips cut off.
“Welcome home, Private Dawson,” a grenadier sergeant of Bragg’s 28th Foot said laconically. “He was as useless in life as he is in death.” He pushed the head with his foot, so it rolled away.
Others of his regiment did not treat Dawson’s torture and death as lightly, and MacKim felt the anger surge through the garrison. He
