No. There were men there from all over the Highlands-from every clan, almost. Only a few men from each clan-remnants and ragtag. But the more in need of a chief, for all that." "And that's what you were to them?" I spoke gently, restraining the urge to smooth the line away with my fingers. "For lack of any better," he said, with the flicker of a smile. He had come from the bosom of family and tenants, from a strength that had sustained him for seven years, to find a lack of hope and a loneliness that would kill a man faster than the damp and the filth and the quaking ague of the prison. And so, quite simply, he had taken the ragtag and remnants, the castoff survivors of the field of Culloden, and made them his own, that they and he might survive the stones of Ardsmuir as well.
( Diana Gabaldon )
[ Voyager ]
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