Bliss raised the knife, prepared to defend herself, and there were curses and blood as she drove the scoundrels back. At the same time, a fight began on the ground.

“Get his shirt open,” one man called. “We’ll know soon enough if this be McKenna.”

Bliss was too busy wielding the blade to watch Jamie, but she knew there was no way he could prevail against so many men. Pure fear burned in her throat as she repeatedly brandished the knife.

When Jamie was, at last, overcome, the two thugs Bliss had been carving at lost interest in her. She jumped down from the wagon, without thinking, and hurried around to the front.

Jamie had been forced to his knees. His face was bruised and bleeding, and one of his eyes looked to be swollen shut, but there was a stubborn pride in his bearing that said he’d never be truly defeated, no matter what was done to him.

With a knife of his own, the ringleader sliced away the buttons of Jamie’s heavy woolen coat, then tore open the shirt beneath. The medallion—a beggar’s badge, Jamie had called it—appeared to be what the man was looking for.

He threw back his head and gave a gruff shout of triumphant laughter. “By God, it’s him!” he shouted. “It’s him!”

The men on either side of Jamie wrenched him to his feet. Bliss caught his eye once, but he looked through her, as though she’d never mattered to him at all.

“Take the woman,” he said evenly, “and leave me alone.”

There was a murmur of agreement all around; the evildoers obviously liked this idea.

Only the man facing off with Jamie shook his head. “Our business ain’t with her,” he said. Then, after a slow, hateful look at Jamie, he asked, “You remember me, don’t you, McKenna? Bert Dunnigan?”

Jamie nodded. “I remember.”

The sounds of bleating sheep and barking dogs mingled in the brisk, blood-scented air, but Bliss was too furious and too scared to place any importance on that. She and Jamie were in dire straits, and he’d offered her to these monsters in an effort to save himself!

Dunnigan drew back his fist and planted a sudden, hard blow in Jamie’s midsection, and Bliss heard the air rush from his lungs. He was powerless to defend himself, since his arms were being held, and he was nearly unrecognizable for the blood on his face, but he spat in defiance all the same.

“I’ve had this to remember you by all these years, mate,” Dunnigan said, pointing to his own disfigured nose. “Now, I’ll have me revenge. You’ll live to tell the story of the day Bert Dunnigan fixed you, but you won’t be so pretty, Jamie boy. I mean to crush that muzzle of yours just like you done to me in Queensland.”

Recalling how Jamie had tossed her to these lions like a piece of raw meat, Bliss elbowed her way forward to stand at Dunnigan’s side. “Let me do it,” she said, glaring at her husband and knotting one hand into a fist.