. . . “All men in line!”

    Daniel shook at the nearby shout. Leg irons clanked as men moved across the ship’s deck.  “Head the line aft!” commanded the boatswain.

    Daniel took his place in the straggling line of prisoners, a dozen men back from the front of the line, which wound around the stern deck behind the main mast.

    Captain Greene stood in an open space before the mast, a hard expression on his leathery face, and waited for the clanking to subside.

    “You men! Come one-by-one to the table here and give the clerk your name. He’ll write it down in the log, so’s we have a record of who’s on board. And he’ll give you a number. Remember it.”

    He looked at the ragtag line without any interest. “That is all.”

    The captain strode away, and Daniel returned to his thoughts as the line began to move.

    No, it wasn’t what he expected, not at all—a prisoner of war. Still, he was alive. Many who had started with him were not.

    Because he knew how to handle a horse and how to be civil to the men who took command, Daniel had better luck of it than many others from Clan Colquhoun who felt pressed into service and showed their feelings.

    Many of these clansmen walked, day after day of marching from where they gathered at Sterling, south out of Scotland and into England toward Worcester.

    Oh, yes; the war was about the right of the king to rule, rather than the Puritans, and Daniel had no sympathy with these severe Protestants who had killed the young king’s father. But he felt no great kinship with the king, despite everyone saying he was of Scottish blood. What had Charles done for Scotland? 

    “Yours?”

    The young clerk looked up from the logbook, annoyed to have to ask and wait.

    “Daniel MacCoan.”

    For a moment the eyes of the two young men held, as the sounds of their voices remained in their minds.

    “Daniel” – the Englishman could spell that right enough. But the rest; well, this Scottish tongue trailed off in oo’s or o’s— but which letters exactly, it was hard to tell. 

    The clerk, his uncertainty quickly mastered by indifference, wrote down the number 12 and the name “Daniel Mackhoe.”

    “You’re 12,” he said to Daniel, but he was already looking at the next man in line.

    Daniel stepped to the side under the watchful eye of the first mate of the ship, who sized him up and down, wrote something in a small book, and nodded for Daniel to move along. Daniel walked toward the only clansman he knew who was already done with the line.

    “The names are so they can keep us separate, Daniel,” John Colquhoun said.  “Those of us from the same clan.”