Haytham was panting heavily as he leaned against a nearby tree, glad that with a whistle, his horse came back to him, nickering as if scolding him for being so noisy. He dug through his saddlebags, grabbing a roll of fresh bandages and hastily wrapping the wound on his torso. While the wound was not deep, it stretched from the top of his left hip, to just below his ribs on the right side. He had Williams – who lay dying ten feet from him, gurgling his last breaths from his slit throat – to thank for this wound and the bullet wounds in his upper right arm – the bullets had gone clean through, and had avoided hitting the bone, but even so, his hands shook from the pain and his mind would begin to swim from the blood loss if he wasn't careful.

Bauers – whom he had shot through the head at point blank range – he had dragged into some dense bushes already, hiding the body the best that his exhausted mind could manage. Williams he would leave by the side of the road, having taken everything out of the other's pockets and made it look like as though he had been ambushed and killed by bandits. She had managed to catch his back again, this time a terribly painful cut along the middle of his back as well as a couple of stab wounds in Haytham's legs.

He had… He had to get moving. His sounds were as well-bandaged as his clumsy fingers were going to allow, and he ate and drank as much food and drink as he could stand – to keep his body from shutting down completely – and he barely managed to get on his horse, all of his wounds protesting in a symphony of agony as he did so.

The next few days blurred together in a haze of pain, hunger and thirst as he urged his horse to move as fast as it could muster, without killing the beast. As much as sleep dragged at his mind, Haytham refused to rest until he was back in New York, back to relative safety. He was fairly certain that Williams and Bauers had not confided their concerns about him supposedly being a traitor to the others, but Haytham was uncertain, and if they thought they could take his Connor from him… Take his order… They were wrong.

Haytham knew he was in trouble on the dawn of the… Fifth? Day. He should have made it back to New York by now… Or at least found a small settlement. He knew that he had been traveling in the correct direction the entire time, and that his horse had not wandered. But he felt so very, very cold, and he could not stop shivering. The pain in his wounds was starting to get worse as well, and the small part of his mind that was not stumbling around in a deep fog knew that infection had possibly set in.

The trees had thinned, and the ground beneath him had broadened and turned to an earthen brown in the way that the road to a town or a village would, filling Haytham with hope that he might find some help here.

A pair of men, one tall and one a bit shorter stopped and stared at him. Haytham was about to call a greeting, when the darkness that had been eating at the edges of his vision filled in the rest of his sight, as he felt a slight breeze across his face.

Terry and Godfrey had been on their way to the inn when they heard the hoof-beats of a horse. They had been expecting Connor – the only one who regularly traveled far enough to need a horse, as everyone else was in town, and those who sold their wares did so via one of Connor's ship, as it was less risky than trying to do so by themselves due to the bandits that plagued the area… As well as the soldiers on both sides of the conflict for the future of the colonies.

Who they saw instead was a black-and blue clad, silver-haired man. His clothes looked as though they were once fine – but dust and black splotches that looked suspiciously like blood covered worrying amounts of the man's clothes. The stranger blinked at the two of them, opened his mouth, as if preparing to say something… Before his eyes rolled back in his head and the poor bastard fell off of his horse.

They rushed over to the fallen man, noting immediately that there were bandages covering the blotchy areas, and that a cautious touch to the stranger's forehead from Terry revealed a burning fever. "I will go contact Dr. White, this poor man needs help." The red haired man muttered "You're bigger than I am, and damn is he tall so you will be able to carry him better. This horse looks almost as bad as her rider, poor thing."

Godfrey nodded, picking up the stranger and realizing two things. One this stranger was armed with a sword, a pair of pistols and one of the hidden blades that Connor wore. The other was that the stranger's clothes were indeed made out of a fine material. Miss Ellen had only recently been able to purchase silk, and the soft material felt the same as the stranger's. Whoever this man was, he came from money, or had a wealthy patron. He ran after Terry with as much speed as he dared, not wanting to jar the injured man out of sleeping. Interestingly enough, the mare followed closely behind him, occasionally nibbling on his hair, seemingly anxious about her rider.