Chapter V: Part 5

“I aim to go tonight, not tomorrow morning,” he said. “Say what’s got to be said, Kitty.”

“Well then, I will.” She was not looking at him now. She fixed her eyes on a candle burning in a sconce across the room. “Tonight I went out to meet--a man--who was expecting Sally Rose. You can see why she couldn’t go.”

He grinned. “Yes,” he said. “Sally Rose ain’t geared right now to travel far. Who was the man? Oh--I bet I know--that redcoat she took such a notion to.”

“Yes, it was Gerry. Captain Gerald Malory of the Twenty-third. I did see him, and he warned me. He told us to get out of Charlestown, for the British are about to strike.”

Tom leaned forward. “When?” he demanded. “Where?”

“Any night now. By the end of the week, surely. Here, or in Dorchester. Gerry wasn’t sure. But if it should be Bunker Hill--”

“Bunker Hill would be a right handy site for them to hold,” muttered Tom. “We thought they was about ready to go. But before this we had no real word.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he laid his hand over hers. Then he stood up.

“Guess I better make for camp,” he said. “This is important information you got here. I’ll carry the news straight to Stark. He’ll be the man to tell. He’ll know what steps to take. You was smart, Kitty, to tell me. May make a big difference--to both sides. Don’t suppose you’ve got a horse about?”

“Indeed we have,” cried Kitty, relieved that she had told her disturbing secret and eager to be of further help, if that were possible. “There are two horses in the barn that belong to Uncle Moses Chase. Sally Rose and I brought them from Newburyport. Gran says they’re eating their heads off, but she hasn’t sent them home. But they’re only plow horses.”

“Kind I’m best used to. Like the gun, I’ll see you get it back some day.” He stroked the blunderbuss that now accompanied him everywhere. “Don’t know when I’ll see you again Kitty. Not here, likely. If the British are aiming to come this way, you folks will have to go.”

“Oh, we will. Just as soon as I can talk to Gran and Sally Rose. Back to Newburyport, perhaps. Why don’t you come to see us there?”

“Can’t tell. Looks like I’ll have some fighting to do first. Glad you took our side and told me that British fellow’s secret, instead of hiding his little plan for him.”

A startled look came over Kitty’s face. “Why--why, I did betray Gerry, didn’t I? I--I never thought of it like that.”

“’Course you betrayed him. You’re too good a Yankee to do aught else, as I can see. Good-by, Kitty.”

He strode into the kitchen on his way to the garden and the barn behind it.

The last thing he heard was a triumphant squeal from Sally Rose.

* * * * *

Colonel John Stark of the New Hampshire line was not in his quarters that night, but walking among the tents on the hillsides above Medford, talking with his men. After the long ride from Charlestown, Tom Trask felt weary and breathless when he finally caught up with his old neighbor.

The colonel stood in a grove of oak trees where a little brook drained down. All along the brook the crude sailcloth tents clustered very thick. Campfires were burning low now. Some of the men lay sleeping on the ground beside them. Others were playing cards, jubilant when they could fling down the ace to take the queen. Stark was talking with a couple of grizzled veterans who had fought beside him in the Indian wars, but he broke off when the younger man came panting up.

“Where you been, lad?” he asked, and clapped Tom on the shoulder. “Couldn’t believe it when Moore reported you missing. Shut up in gaol, maybe? I know you got some good reason for being away.”

Tom could not bring himself to look at the keen blue-gray eyes and sharp, viselike face.

“I been raiding the islands with some of Putnam’s men,” he muttered. “But on my way back tonight, I heard a word in Charlestown you ought to know.”

“You got no business raiding islands, nor being in Charlestown,” snapped the colonel, all the warmth and friendliness gone from his voice. “Get back to Captain Moore, and tell him where you been. He’ll deal with you.” He turned away.

Tom nerved himself to step forward and pluck the sleeve of Stark’s new blue uniform.

“Colonel Stark, sir,” he stammered. “You know what I heard in Charlestown? It come straight from a British captain, what I heard.”

The colonel turned toward him again. “What was it?” he demanded.

Tom lowered his voice. No use in alarming the men. “Oh, a very great secret it was, told in confidence to a girl. This captain said that the British mean to move out of Boston before the week’s end. They mean to seize and fortify either Dorchester Heights or Bunker Hill.” He paused expectantly.

John Stark uttered a mirthless ha-ha.

“I know,” he said. “Seems like you be about the forty-first private to come up and tell me that. The word’s spread wide, from here to Jamaica Plain.” Then he shook his head. “Too bad you done what you done. I’d ha’ liked to ha’ recommended a sergeant’s knot o’ red for your shoulder when I sent you back to Captain Moore.”

_Chapter Twelve_

THUNDER IN THE AIR

The bells were sounding midnight in Medford Steeple, turning Tuesday night into Wednesday morning, when Tom Trask tied his borrowed horse to a nearby fence and lay down beside the dying campfire of his own company. After the rebuke by his colonel and another one next day by Captain Moore, he hardly expected John Stark to send for him within a day or two, but that was what came about.

Stark was holding a conference with a handful of his captains in the little hollow between Plowed Hill and Winter Hill. It had probably been a green valley once, but now the young grass was all trampled away, and so was a field of what had started out to be Indian corn. All about stretched the tents and crude wooden shelters of the New Hampshire men. The colonel was in his shirt sleeves, and his lean face looked grimmer than usual. He had no smile of greeting, but he did not seem to be angry any more.

“See you brought your horse, Tom, like I said. Was surprised when ’twas reported to me you owned such an animal. They’re scarcer’n hen’s teeth around here.”

“I only borrowed him, sir,” replied Tom quickly. “Borrowed him in Charlestown. He belongs in Newburyport. When I can, I mean to return him home.”

“Don’t hurry about it,” replied the colonel. “See that cart over there?” He pointed to a heavy wagon, empty, three young men standing close by. A horse was fastened between the shafts of it, but he was a lank, ill-favored nag and looked scarce able to go.

“Yes, sir,” said Tom.

“Then take your critter over to help the other one pull. General Ward has promised to issue some lead to us, if we send to Cambridge for it. That’s Peter Christie, Hugh Watts, and Asa Senter who are going with you. Good lads. I knew their folks in Londonderry before I was grown. Be as quick as you can about it, too. We haven’t got enough powder and ball to scare off a herd of deer, let alone the British Army.”

“Yes, sir,” said Tom again. He waited for further instructions, but none were forthcoming. Colonel Stark turned back to his worried-looking officers. After a moment Tom led his horse over to the wagon.

The Londonderry men were indeed good fellows, he soon found out, used to the same life as he. They had fished in the same streams and hunted over the same mountains, knew as little about books and high living, as much about how to plant corn or cut down a white pine so it would fall the right way. And soon they were all singing crude old-fashioned country songs as they drove along the winding road.

Tom looked westward across the pleasant farms to the faint blue line of hills beyond them, and he thought of the unseen army that was supposed to be circling tightly all around Boston, an army of men like himself and the Londonderry boys. Some said it was ten thousand strong, and some said twenty, all the way from Medford River to Jamaica Plain. He thought of that other army, swaggering through the streets of Boston; men, he supposed, like that redcoat captain he’d brought home in chains a while back--and nobody knew what strength they had. He remembered Kitty’s warning that the British meant to strike by the week’s end. Well, here it was, Friday, June sixteenth, and the weather hotter’n the burning roof of hell. If the British were coming, they’d better be on their way. Maybe they were on their way. Everybody in camp was worn out and restless with expecting them, but nobody seemed to know.

Just then his horse gave a neigh, laid back its ears, and stood still. Perforce, the other horse halted, too.

“Must ha’ seen a rabbit,” said Hugh Watts, peering over the side of the cart into the thick grass that grew beside the road. “I don’t see anything but ripe strawberries, though. Think we could stop to pick a few?”

Asa Senter shook his head. “Wouldn’t hardly dare it,” he objected. “Stark wants us to go and get back. By the look o’ the sun, it’s already six o’clock, and we still got about another mile.”

Tom leaped down from the wagon. “I don’t think it was a rabbit,” he said. “He acts more like there was thunder in the air.”

“Not a cloud anywheres that I can see,” said Peter Christie.

“Don’t have to be.” Tom patted the horse’s flank and started to lead them ahead. “If there’s thunder somewheres over back, a critter’ll always know.”

“Feel a bit uneasy myself,” said Asa, getting down to walk beside Tom. “Look! There’s a steeple and some roofs sticking up through the trees. Cambridge must be just ahead.”

There were a sight of mighty fine houses round Cambridge Common, Tom thought, as they approached it. Big square mansions, some of them; some with gambrel roofs, mostly painted yellow and white. But he didn’t see any of the sort of folk who looked as if they lived in the houses; pretty women with flowers and jewels, or gentlemen in velvet jackets wearing swords. The roads that led to the Common were thronged with soldiers like himself, in cowhide shoes, leather breeches, and tattered tow-cloth shirts, with bandanas round their heads; and all too many, for his taste, had a short-stemmed pipe gripped between their teeth. They all seemed to be excited about something.

He had no trouble in getting the old Hastings house pointed out to him, but he was unable to lead his horse anywhere near it because the crowd was so great. They seemed to be having some sort of muster on the Common, for men were drawn up in rank there, maybe a thousand or so.

“What’s a-going on, Tom?” Peter demanded.

“I don’t know,” said Tom, “but I aim to find out. You boys stay here with the cart, and I’ll go over to General Ward’s and ask. We got to go there anyway to get the lead.”

He left his companions and made his way forward till he reached the rail fence before the dwelling house that had been pointed out to him as the headquarters of the Great American Army. A row of Lombardy poplar trees stood up tall and pointed behind the fence, and just as Tom elbowed his way to the gate, a man came out to stand before the wide front door.

First there was a loud shouting, and cheers, and then a hush. The seething mass of men around Cambridge Common stood very still.

The man in the doorway was not General Ward, surely, for he wore a long black gown with flowing sleeves and a square-topped cap such as Tom had never seen before, with a tassel hanging down. But two other men stood behind him in blue coats and three-cornered hats, and they were officers, right enough.

However it was the black-clad man who spoke, loudly and clearly, so that as many as possible might hear.

“I, Samuel Langdon, President of Harvard College, am here to assure you that the hearts of our little community go with you in your heroic venture. With you go the hopes of Massachusetts, and the future, perhaps, of our whole great country. I am here to bless your going out and your coming home. May His strength uphold you when your need is greatest, His spirit restore you when you falter, and His truth abide in you always. My sons, let us pray.”

Tom whipped off his cap, bowed his head, and closed his eyes, aware that hundreds of other men were doing the same. But his throat tightened and he heard no more of President Langdon’s prayer. This was the beginning, he thought. Concord Fight hadn’t been anything to what this would be. At Concord Fight they had all come a-running, just the way men come when the word goes out that a house is afire. But this was like when a whole town got together by plan and moved out against the French or the Indians. Concord Fight had been a fight--just that--but this wouldn’t be a fight, what was coming now. It would be a battle. It would be a war.

“_Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori_,” finished Dr. Langdon soberly. “It is sweet and fitting, my sons, to die for one’s country.”

He lifted his eyes and stood silent, looking over the heads of the company, straight at the small square bell tower of a church across the way.

Everyone began to talk at once, it seemed, and in the uproar Tom thrust open the gate that led to the Hastings house and crossed the lawn to the back door. Lilac trees grew close to it, and here, away from the glare of the sinking sun, the air was fragrant and cool. A young man in a trim blue coat sat at a table just inside the door.

“Lead for Colonel Stark?” he replied to Tom’s question. “Yes, he’s to have a supply our men cut out of the organ pipes in the English church across the Common. Trouble is, I can’t think for the minute where ’tis stored. Suppose you come back tomorrow.”

Tom pulled a tendril off a grape vine that grew on a trellis over the door and began to chew it. “Stark wants me to bring it back tonight,” he said.

The young officer sat up and surveyed him insolently.

“Stark may not know it, but there’s a war beginning,” he announced.

“Yes,” agreed Tom. “There is. That’s what he wants the lead for.”

Suddenly they were both laughing.

“You’re right, man,” answered the young officer in a friendlier tone. “We’re all on edge, and it takes us different ways, I guess. But I still don’t know where the stuff has got to, and I’m afraid we can’t do anything till Prescott takes his force out of town, which he’ll do as soon as it’s dark enough. Come back a little after nine.”

“Where’s Prescott going?” Tom asked.

The officer laid his finger across his mouth. “Prescott knows--and nobody else has any need to. Have you got rations, lad?”

“No,” said Tom, “we come empty-handed. Three others besides me.”

The officer wrote rapidly on a slip of paper.

“Here. Take this to the head of the Common when you hear them blow a bugle up there. Give it to the mess sergeant, and he’ll see you have some supper.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Tom. He went back to where he had left his companions.

He found them sitting along the top rail of a fence while the horses cropped the wayside grass.

“Did you find out what’s afoot, Tom?” asked Hugh Watts eagerly.

The men in the streets were thinning out, but those on the Common, though no longer drawn up at attention, still remained there.

“Oh, there’s a war beginning, and nobody knows where the lead is,” said Tom, flinging himself down on the grass. “Didn’t find out a thing beyond that.”

“We did,” said Asa. “After the man got through praying, we asked around. Seems Colonel Prescott’s taking out twelve hundred men with packs and blankets and a day’s ration. There’s a fatigue crew along, and picks and shovels like they mean to fortify. Nobody knows where.”

“It’ll either be behind Dorchester or Charlestown,” said Tom. He thought fleetingly of Kitty, and the yellow-haired minx, and the gallant old woman. He hoped they’d got safe away, but he didn’t think of them long. “There’s the bugle,” he said. “Let’s go get supper.”

Supper in Cambridge camp that night, for such men as did not have regular rations, consisted of a slab of salt fish and a hunk of hard, grayish bread, served with a noggin of sour beer. After the boys had eaten they walked about the town, down to the red brick buildings of the college, filled now with soldiers instead of scholars, and into the gray flush-board English church to see if by any chance the lead was still there. The church was full of Connecticut men who were using it for barracks, and they knew nothing about the lead at all.

By nine o’clock the twilight had gathered thickly about the little town, and the men on the Common formed in ranks and began their march. Two sergeants walked ahead carrying dark lanterns, half open so as to throw the light behind. Then came two blue-coated officers, Colonel Prescott and Colonel Gridley, then the rest of the detail, made up of Massachusetts and Connecticut men. Tom was not surprised when he saw that they took the Charlestown Road.

“Bet they’re going to fortify Bunker Hill,” he told his friends. “They’re carrying entrenchment tools. Wouldn’t bother with them if the British had already struck. Must be we mean to get there first and beat them to it. You go back to the cart, and I’ll call round at headquarters again. We got to get that lead and start for Winter Hill.”

The town had quieted down now, and most of the men remaining there had gone to the houses where they were quartered, or to their tents in the fields beyond. Nobody would do much sleeping, Tom thought. Tense and nervous they all felt, trying to tell themselves they were too much men to be afraid--just like any flesh and blood thing when there was thunder in the air.

Two lanterns were burning on poles set up in the yard of the Hastings house, but the back door was locked when Tom rapped on it. So was the front door, when he tried to enter there. Through the window he could see candles burning in prismed holders, and a group of men sitting around a mahogany table, some in uniforms, others in buff and gray and bottle green coats. One of the officers stood up to speak. He was heavily built, with pointed features and bright eyes, but his face had an unhealthy look. Must be Ward himself, thought Tom. All the Army knew their leader was a sick man.

“When the Committee of Safety advised me this afternoon,” he began, “that it was deemed best for us to fortify Bunker Hill--”

Just then a sentry tapped Tom on the shoulder with a gun barrel. “What are ye lurking about for?” he growled in a rough voice.

Tom turned around sharply. The sentry was an oldish man, unshaven, with shaggy hair and beard.

“I got business here,” he said. “I come to get Colonel Stark’s lead, and by the great Jehovah, I mean to do the same.”

The sentry spat. “Maybe ye’re honest,” he said. “Ye look to be. But General Ward’s a-talking to some important men from the Congress o’ Massachusetts right now. Couldn’t let ye in there if ye was King George himself, with the Queen tagging along.”

“I’ll wait here till they’re through then,” insisted Tom. “I’ll wait right here.”

The sentry shrugged. “Guess there’s no harm in that,” he muttered, and ambled off.

Tom sat down on the grass with his back against a poplar tree and looked up at the stars. They were just as bright as they had been when he crossed Breed’s Hill a few nights ago. He wondered if tomorrow he’d be going back there, lugging Kitty’s old blunderbuss with him. Suddenly he realized that he was sleepy. The tension had eased out of him, even though there was still thunder in the air, the thunder of war about to break. A man could only keep himself keyed up for so long. But it wouldn’t do--now--to go--to sleep. He ought to get up and walk--get--up--and--walk--

He opened his eyes and shook himself. How did it get to be like that--early morning, the light as broad as day? The sky was red and golden over eastward where the sea must lie. The grass around him was wet with dew. Smoke was curling upward from the chimneys round about, and in somebody’s barnyard he could hear a rooster crow. Lord forgive him, he’d slept all night. They’d drum him out of camp or at least give him forty lashes, and he deserved it, too.

He stood up just as a horse and rider came spurring to the gate. The rider dismounted hastily and approached the front door. He was a trim, neat man with fair hair, but he looked feverish and ill. Almost immediately a pint-sized man came out to let him in. The two shook hands.

“Ah, Elbridge, Elbridge Gerry, my good friend,” murmured the newcomer. “It is folly to try to seize and hold Charlestown. Yet, I must go.”

“Ah no, Dr. Warren,” pleaded the smaller man. “You are too well known. You stayed in Boston too long, and the British know too well what a great pillar of strength you have been to our colonial cause. As surely as you go up Bunker Hill, you will be slain.”

“I know,” answered the doctor tensely. “I told the friends with whom I dined last night that I would go up the Hill today and never come off again. I slept wretchedly, and my head aches, but after an hour or two--”

“Sirs,” interrupted Tom politely, “I am sorry to bother you when you’re about such weighty business, but I been here since six o’clock last night, trying to get some lead for Colonel Stark.”

Elbridge Gerry gave a snort of impatience, but Dr. Warren turned and smiled at the boy.

“I am sorry you had the long delay, lad. I myself saw that the lead was dispatched to Stark late yesterday afternoon. He’ll know what to do with it, if anybody does. His men will have melted it into bullets by now, and may be shooting it at the British, for all I know.”

He turned again to Mr. Gerry. “Ah, sir, ‘_Dulce decorum_,’ as all men know or must learn. Let us go inside, and send someone to lead my horse away, for he is as spent as I.”

Tom walked thoughtfully back to where his comrades would still be asleep in the empty cart. ‘_Dulce decorum_’! He knew what the Latin meant, for President Langdon had translated it yesterday afternoon. “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” But was it, he wondered. The sun felt gloriously warm on his back, and made his blood tingle. The birds were singing in the elm trees round the Common. Kitty was a pretty girl, and there were other pretty girls. Sweet to die? That sounded like a thing old men would think of, tired old men who never had to go out and fight, who would die in bed at ninety-three or so. Still, if you had to do it, you had to do it, and he guessed he was as ready as he’d ever be.

Over towards Charlestown he heard the boom of a heavy gun.

_Chapter Thirteen_

THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

Gerry Malory was back in Devonshire at daybreak on that hot June morning, only it did not seem to him to be morning, or any special time of day. He stood in a low valley opening toward the sea, and there were little farms all around him with hedgerows in between them, and here and there a church spire reaching toward the sky. He was not alone, for a man stood beside him, a man he had never seen before, about his father’s age, dressed in quaint old-fashioned clothes, and carrying an ancient gun. The gun looked like the one that belonged to the Yankee that had taken him prisoner in the tavern by Ipswich Green. The man was shaking his head and scowling. He seemed to be angry about something. Gerry was ready to protest that he hadn’t done anything wrong, when suddenly he thought that maybe he had. Maybe he’d been poaching again.

Just then the man spoke. “It’s the coming country, lad,” he said. “Don’t make the mistake I did in my time.”

“What mistake?” Gerry murmured, but he thought he knew. His words were drowned out by the deep boom of thunder. Again and again the thunder sounded, and the echoes rolled over valley and hill and sea.

His body shook like an aspen in a storm wind; his eyelids snapped wide apart. He was in the warehouse behind the stables near Long Wharf in Boston, Massachusetts, and Sergeant Higgs had him by the shoulder. The thunder still boomed in his ears, but the Devon landscape had gone back into his memory, where it probably came from. He was lying on his own blanket on a heap of straw, with the regiment’s goat tethered nearby.

“Wake up, lad! Don’t you hear the guns?” Higgs was saying.

Gerry pulled himself erect. He found it hard to come out of the dream that had seemed so real to him.

“Yes, I hear them,” he said. “Whose guns are they?”

“Whose would they be?” scoffed the sergeant. “Do you think the Yankees have guns like that?”

“No--no.” He was wide awake now, wider awake than he wanted to be, he thought, for the cannonading sounded ominous and near. “What’s happening, Jack? Are we marching against them? Have we attacked--or they?”

“Can’t tell yet,” said Sergeant Higgs. “All we know is, we hear gunfire. Lieutenant Apthorp has gone to headquarters to find out. You better get some breakfast. It’s best we be ready for anything.”

In the cobbled square outside, the men of the Twenty-third had built their usual cookfire, just as they did every morning, and gathered round it, salt pork spitted on bayonets and stale bread handed round by the mess sergeant. Lieutenant Apthorp did not come back, and Lieutenant Julian went to see what was keeping him. The cannonading went on. It was coming from the ships in the river beyond the North End, most of the men agreed. Maybe the Yankees had got together some sort of raft and were moving by water against Boston. The Twenty-third seemed more amused than frightened at this suggestion.

And then, without any official announcement being made, the word was passed from mouth to mouth, and everybody knew.

The Yankees had taken the hills above Charlestown in the night, and built some sort of entrenchment there. They were being fired at from three sides by the British men-o’-war, but it began to seem as if this would not be enough to dislodge them, as if a force would have to go out and drive them from the hill.

In the town behind him Gerry could hear the rattle of artillery carriages, the thud of horses’ hoofs as the dragoons galloped here and there. General Gage had called for his officers to meet at the Province House, and some of the men went off to hover about that grim, narrow structure and get the word as soon as it was handed down.

Gerry did not go to the Province House. He went to the edge of the wharf and sat there, dangling his legs over the side. The sun was getting higher and hotter, and he looked up at the sun, and then down at the thick grayish water lapping silently round the piers below. He thought about his dream, and he thought about the girl called Kitty, who was not so distractingly fair as Sally Rose, and wondered if she had got safe away. He thought about Captain Blakeslee lying dead under the locust tree. True, he had never wanted to be a soldier, but once he became one, he’d expected to bear his part well. Once he’d have been eager to march out when he heard firing, but he was none so eager now. Maybe he was afraid. Maybe that was a bad omen. He’d heard around the campfire that men who were going into their last battle often felt that way. If only he could forget the dream....

The sounds of confusion in the town behind him seemed to increase and grow. Now that he thought of it, none of the usual daily noises could be heard: not the tapping of the carpenters’ hammers, nor the thumping of handlooms, nor the creak of wooden machinery. The little Negro boys were nowhere about with their cries of “Sweep oh! Sweep oh!” He suspected that the town of Boston would do no work this day. Everywhere men were shouting and bells were ringing: Christ’s Church with its royal peal, the North Church with its sour note, and half a dozen more. Just as usual, the breeze that blew over Long Wharf smelled of fish and whale oil and the nearby stables, of tar, and spice, and wood smoke, but now, or did he imagine it, it had an acrid brimstone tang.

At eleven the men came trooping back, and the word was out. Every man knew what was to be the order of his day.

At half past eleven the men of Gerry’s company paraded on the Common, splendid in scarlet and white and brass, equipped with full kit, blankets, and three days’ rations, and drawn up beside them were fifteen hundred more. The ships’ guns still roared away, and every now and then a terrible blast let go from the battery on Copp’s Hill.

“They say it’s only a handful of farmers,” muttered Jack Higgs. “I’d not think they could stand such punishment for long.”

Gerry looked at Boston Common, the rambling field that had become so familiar to him in the past year: the crooked cowpaths, and the little pond, and the thick clumps of juniper and steeplebush, so handy to come upon when you were walking in the moonlight with a girl; the gravel strip where the officers still raced their horses, in spite of all the town fathers could do. He looked at the gabled mansions and quaint, crooked houses round, as if he never expected to see them any more.

“The Yankees’ll take more punishment than you’d think for,” he said.

Once on the water, the barges from Long Wharf joined with the barges from the North Battery, twenty-eight of them moving in two long parallel lines, filled with scarlet-coated men. In the leading boats were two polished brass field pieces, and the noonday sun struck everywhere on colorful banners and gleaming arms. For the Tories in Boston, it must have been a splendid sight, but Gerry turned his eyes toward the Charlestown peninsula as the troops were rowed across the blue bay.

Smoke and flame and awful sound kept pouring forth from the great guns of the fleet--the _Somerset_, the _Falcon_, the _Lively_. Dimly through the barrage he could see the little village where he had gone drinking at the Bay and Beagle and courting in the graveyard under the spring moon. On the hill above it, grown up overnight like a mushroom, stood a small square earthworks, silent, except for one erratic cannon that spoke now and then. Black dots of men moved about the earthworks, but no columns issued forth drawn up in battle array, no reinforcements poured in from any side.

Gerry’s spirits rose and he cleared his throat. “Is that,” he asked the sergeant, “the great fortification we’re all ordered out to tear down?”

The sergeant laughed grimly. “Don’t look very fearsome, does it?” he agreed. “But after the way they run us back through Lexington, I don’t trust them devils.”

“And I thought it was Bunker Hill instead of Breed’s they’d be likely to fortify,” went on Gerry. “That’s how we would have chosen. But that’s Bunker Hill, standing up behind there, bare as a plate. The little dugout is on Breed’s Hill, below.”

“Breed’s or Bunker makes no difference now,” said Sergeant Higgs. “Keep your cartridges dry in the landing. We’re headed in towards shore.”

A few minutes later they were all drawn up in a low-lying field where Charlestown peninsula extended, pear-shaped, into the sea. Gerry found himself in the front line, far to the right, with the light infantry of the Twenty-third and the King’s Own. To the left stood the grenadiers, and behind him the Fifty-second and the Fifth. He was feeling cheerful and brave now, and as safe as London Tower. It reassured him even more when the order came to break ranks and dine on the rations in their knapsacks before going farther along.

Sprawled in the hot sun, chewing his beef and biscuit, he eyed the landscape round him: the green, sloping fields, some cocked hay, and some standing grass; the swamp and brick kilns to the left; Breed’s Hill above, where the black dots still crawled around the tiny redoubt. He talked with the other men.

All the young lads, he found, were in their glory that the attack was to be made straight on, that this detachment of the British Army would pound forward full force and set the Americans running, or beat them down into their native clay. But the old wise sergeants shook their heads and said it was a pity Gage hadn’t ordered them to land at the Neck. They could have bottled up the Yankees in Charlestown then, and starved them out, and not had to fire a shot.

No, somebody else said, for to do that would have meant sending a force between two wings of its enemy, and that was a tactic frowned upon long before Caesar marched through Gaul. In the end they all agreed that they were well enough satisfied with the way things had fallen out. They’d march up that hill in double-quick time, drive the cowardly Yankees out of their burrow, and be back drinking beer in Boston before the sun went down.

They were beginning to take out packs of dog-eared playing cards when the word passed among them that reinforcements were disembarking on the fields to the left; that Howe had sent for the reinforcements because the Americans were bringing in more troops, the earthworks had been extended far to the left, and he didn’t like the looks of things at all.

Gerry began to put his uneaten food away in his knapsack. There wasn’t as much room in it as there should have been, because at the last moment he had decided to stuff in the rough shirt and breeches he wore when he went about the Yankee countryside. He smiled now, as he saw them there. Didn’t think he’d have a need for them, but you never know. Just then the bugles sounded and the officers called them to attention. Like one man the assembled army was on its feet. Gerry could see the newly landed troops drawn up away to the left, facing the redoubt.

General Howe, dark, florid and heavily built, stood forth and spoke to his men.

“Gentlemen, I am very happy to have the honor of commanding so fine a body.... I do not doubt that you will behave like Englishmen and as becometh good soldiers. If the enemy will not come from their entrenchments, we must drive them out, otherwise the town of Boston will be set on fire by them.... I shall not desire one of you to go a step further than where I go at your head. Remember, gentlemen, we have no recourse, if we lose Boston, but to go on board our ships ... which will be very disagreeable to us all.”

General Howe stepped a little aside and stood smiling proudly round him, his hand on his sword. The troops stood tensely, bayonets in hand, waiting the order to move ahead. The cannonading from the ships was so steady that they did not hear it any more, but the guns of Boston now set up an iron clamor that seemed fit to shake the earth. Now the artillery rolled toward the redoubt.

Gerry looked up at the serene blue sky, at a cluster of apple trees a little way ahead. There were trees like that on his father’s farm in Devon, and he wondered if he’d ever again see them growing there. He looked at the hill where spouts of dust shot upward as heavy balls hit the turf of the redoubt. Suppose they did have to board their ships and sail away? Maybe he wouldn’t sail away, maybe he’d go and find blue-eyed Kitty. Maybe he would....

The artillery seemed to have slowed and faltered, bogged down in the miry earth at the swamp edge, crushing the blue flag lilies as it moved forward again. At last came the order the scarlet host had been waiting for.

Gerry gripped his bayonet and stepped out as he had been trained to do. A rippling field of buttercups and daisies lay ahead, and beyond it a rail fence, but he saw no likely danger there. He glanced toward the redoubt where General Pigot was to lead the attack. Howe would march on the rail fence that joined a stone wall running to the waterside. Then Howe’s regiments and the light infantry would shatter the Yankees’ left and sweep across it, swinging inland to overwhelm the earthworks from behind. It seemed like an unbeatable plan.

The light infantry, men from the Welsh Fusileers and the King’s Own forged steadily ahead--but not easily. The day was growing hotter. What with ammunition, food, blankets, and firelocks, they were weighted down a hundred pounds to a man. Gerry felt the sweat burst out on his face. He wished he had a drink. He wished he could run his finger under the stiff leather stock that gripped his throat. He wished he could rip off his beaver hat. Clouds of black smoke with white under-edges were billowing up to the west of Breed’s Hill. Looked like Charlestown Village was afire. Well, Admiral Graves had wanted to burn it long ago.

He waded through the thick grass, almost to his knees, then out on a muddy strip of beach littered with driftwood and small dead creatures of the sea. Here they halted briefly to re-form.

Grouped now in columns of fours, the Welsh Fusileers in the lead, the light infantry advanced along the narrow strip of shore. They drew close to the rough fieldstone wall. That it had been hastily thrown up, Gerry could see now. Undoubtably there would be Yankees behind it. He half lifted his bayonet. They drew nearer and nearer. They were ready to deploy and charge, when the blast came.

The low stone wall seemed to leap forth at them in a searing torrent of fire. Like corn before the scythe, the men on both sides of him went down. More from shock than anything else. Gerry fell on his knees, but he lifted his gun and fired once from there. Where the bullet went, he never knew. Crouched in the foul-smelling mud, he tried to load again. Wounded men lay all around him. His own company seemed to be cut to pieces, but the King’s Own tried to form a charge and went streaming through. Again the tide of flame leaped forward. The scarlet line, broken in many places, reeled back. Again the officers rallied what was left of them, and again the charge came on. The whole world seemed to be dissolved in blood and fire, the cries of the wounded, the shouts of the officers, and the steady roar of the guns upon the hill.

He tried to pull himself upright, but just then he felt a terrible blow against his head. His ears rang. Stars and circles swam before his eyes, orange, green, and rainbow-hued. He seemed to be no longer a living thing, only one huge dull pain sinking into darkness.

He did not know how long it was before the darkness streamed past him and away, and he saw the stone wall abristle with smoking gun barrels. He lifted his head from the mud and gazed in the other direction. To his horror he saw the scarlet backs of his comrades fleeing helter-skelter toward the barges by the shore. He lay all alone, in the midst of the dying and the dead. One man was calling for a drink of water, and another man gasped out a prayer. Shattered muskets, ripped knapsacks, and the discarded wigs of the officers littered the beach about him.

His head throbbed and seemed to be swelling larger every minute, big as the sun itself, the sun that still glared down from the pitiless blue sky. He couldn’t think clear, and he knew he’d have to think clear, if he ever got out of this alive.

Finally he lifted up his head and saw a steepening of the river bank just ahead of him that made a sort of bluff he could try to crawl under. Inch by inch, painfully, he dragged himself among the fallen men. Most of them lay quiet now and were not troubled by his passage through. They would never be troubled by anything any more. They had not beaten the Americans, but they would never board the ships and sail away.

Once under the safety of the bluff, he lay there and sipped a little of the brackish water which he scooped up in his hands. There was blood on his uniform, and blood was trickling down from somewhere over his left ear, but he did not put his hand up. He did not want to know how badly he was hurt--not right now.

And yet, his own wound wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was the sight of the British Army running away. Running to the barges, fleeing back to Boston, beaten almost to destruction by a mob of American farmers at a stone wall and an earthworks on a hill! What was that old tune the band played sometimes on parade? _The World Turned Upside Down!_

What would happen to him, he wondered, when the Yankees found him lying here? They didn’t have bayonets, most of them, so they couldn’t run him through, but there were other ways to kill a man.

But maybe they wouldn’t, all of them, kill a wounded man, any more than he would. He’d gone among them, traveled through their towns, and found there men no worse than he. And at that he remembered the knapsack and the clothing in it. He reached down; yes, it still hung at his side.

Painfully, haltingly, he pulled off the ruined uniform, the muddy scarlet and blood-stained white. Then he lay there naked in the mud a little while, under the bluff of sun-baked clay, till he had gathered strength enough to pull on the country clothes, the garb of most of the men behind the American line.

“Maybe--if they find me--they’ll think I’m one of theirs,” he muttered, “take me in with their own wounded and bind my head up--and never know.” He managed a weak smile. The last prank he’d ever play on the Yankees, he guessed, but it was worth a try.

Somehow he managed to crawl up the bank and out on the bloody grass. He lifted his eyes toward the redoubt. Could he believe what he saw? It had redcoats swarming all over it, their bayonets drawn, struggling on the parapet with the Americans, leaping down on those below.

“So the lads have come back,” he whispered faintly. “We aren’t beaten after all. I should have known it couldn’t be--not Howe and Pigot! Not the Fusileers and the King’s Own.”

He tried to get to his feet, but he couldn’t because his head was too big and heavy. His head was as big as the whole world. His head was drifting away on a tide of darkness that swept by.

_Chapter Fourteen_

THE YOUNG MAY DIE

Kitty did not know what time it was or how long she had been asleep. She only knew that she was wide awake now, somewhere in the empty black middle of the night, and she could hear Gran’s voice from the taproom below.

“You may be an officer, young man,” Gran was saying, “furthermore, you may have come all the way up here from Connecticut, but I’m not impressed with that. I’m not one of your soldiery, nor obliged to take your orders. This is my son-in-law’s house, and the taxes upon it paid. I mean to stay here till he orders me from it.”

Kitty leaped out of bed and ran to the head of the stairs where she could hear better.

“It’s only for your own safety, Ma’am,” a harassed young voice was explaining. “There’s going to be all hell to pay here tomorrow morning.”

“So you’ve been telling me,” went on Gran calmly, “and in that case, I’d better get some sleep to be ready for it. Good night, young man.”

Kitty heard the slamming of the front door. She crept downstairs.

Gran was methodically taking all the best silverware out of the chest and wrapping each piece separately in flannel.

“What’s the matter, Gran?” asked Kitty. She drew her flimsy nightrail around her and stood there shivering.

Gran went on sorting out porringers and teaspoons. “There’s going to be trouble, child,” she said. “The town’s full of soldiers, and there’s more soldiers digging some sort of burrow above us on the hill. They say by daylight we can expect shooting.”

“Are they British soldiers?” asked Kitty. After all, Gerry Malory had warned her, and she had passed the message on, telling Gran it was something she had heard in the street. Gran had scoffed at the idea, refused to be driven away.

“British! No! They be still drinking and gambling in Boston, and like to stay there till the blast of Gabriel’s horn, if you ask me. These soldiers are our own lads, and they sent the word about that since they’ve entrenched themselves on a hill the British wanted, they look for a battle.”

“If--if there is a battle, what will we do?” asked Kitty.

“We’ll do what is needed,” said Gran shortly. “Right now I want you to wake Sally Rose. Put on your oldest dresses and good stout shoes. No flounces and toothpick heels, mind. Pick up whatever valuables you have and bring them to me.”

Sally Rose, still sleepy-eyed, was enchanted at the prospect of adventure. She brought a whole little chest full of trinkets when they returned to the kitchen. Kitty had only her mother’s cameo brooch, and she pinned that inside her bodice. Gran held out a willow basket full of the carefully wrapped silver.

“You girls take this down to the graveyard and bury it,” she ordered. “If the British come pouring in here tomorrow morning, looking for what they can find, new-turned earth in a graveyard will occasion no comment.” Across the lid of the basket she laid a wooden shovel.

Carrying the basket between them, the girls picked their way through the town in the warm, dim starlight. Here and there they passed by little groups of men who seemed to be patrolling the streets, who looked at them curiously but uttered no challenge. Lights were burning across the river in Boston and on the masts of the _Somerset_ lying at anchor in mid-channel. Cries of “All’s Well!” sounded faintly at intervals from its decks and from the sentries in the town beyond it.

There were no lights or sentries apparent on Bunker Hill, nor yet on Breed’s, when they looked that way, but both hillsides seemed to be alive with moving masses of shadow; a low hum rose above them like the swarming of many hives of bees. Now and then there was a tiny flash of light, or a clang as a shovel hit against stone.

Kitty dug a shallow pit under the flowering quince tree where she had talked with Gerry Malory, and Sally Rose helped to cover it over, once the silver and her own treasures lay safe inside. Then they hurried back to the Bay and Beagle. Gran was trotting about the kitchen, setting many pans of bread to rise, pulling down hams from the rafters, heating the bake ovens red hot.

“Get to work, girls,” she said as they came in, handing Kitty a carving knife and Sally Rose a wooden spoon. “Can’t tell how many men we may have to feed tomorrow.”

When they finished the preparations she considered necessary, they sank down exhausted on benches drawn to the oak table. Kitty noticed that the hands of the tall old clock pointed to a quarter past three.

“My soul and body,” said Gran, “I thought I’d learned to do without it, but a cup of tea would certainly taste good to me right now.”

Sally Rose smiled and her eyes sparkled in the candlelight. “I can get you tea, Gran,” she said. “Father has some hidden away. He says he keeps it for times of need among womenfolk. ’Twas bought long ago before tea-tax time. Put the kettle on, Kitty.”

She went flying into the taproom to the secret cache behind the bar. A little later they sat down again with steaming cups before them.

But Gran’s face was sober, and she spoke more gently than was her wont to do. “I hope that whatever happens tomorrow,” she said, holding her teacup in her hand, not tasting the fragrant liquid, “you girls will behave in a fitting manner, though it may not be easy. There is bound to be much danger about in a battle, and many horrible sights to be seen. When the soldiers came here first and warned us to go away, I thought I would do as they advised me. And then I remembered an old great-grandmother of mine. She lived in a lonely garrison and when the Indians attacked her home, she did not run away.”

“What did she do?” asked Sally Rose, her eyes wide.

“She poured boiling water out of an upstairs window and scalded the varmints,” snapped Gran, with all her usual severity. “And if she could do that, it came to me that I could stay here and do whatever it was needful I should do.”

“Do you think to pour hot water on the British, Gran?” asked Kitty, trying to suppress a giggle.

“Times change,” said Gran, her eyes fixed on the dwindling darkness outside, on the tall hollyhock stems becoming visible in the garden, “and that’s not what will be expected of us, most likely. Only--it comes to me--that sometime, a good many years from now, all of us, yes, even you, Sally Rose, will be great-grandmothers, too.”

“With gray hair?” asked Sally Rose plaintively.

“With gray hair--or no hair at all,” continued Gran. “And then, at that time, we wouldn’t want the young folk of our blood to say we were afraid and ran away when the time of danger came.”

She looked challengingly at the girls.

“No,” said Kitty soberly. “We wouldn’t want that. But what will we do, Gran?”

“Can’t tell for certain. But the way I see it, we keep a victualling house, and when there’s a lull in the fight, if a fight there be, the men will want food and drink. We’ll be here to provide it for them. All we have to do is the thing we do every day--”

A low boom like thunder, and yet sharper and more explosive than thunder, rolled and echoed in the direction of Morton’s Point. A moment later the windows rattled and the tavern shook.

Gran covered her ears and closed her eyes. “Merciful heavens, it’s begun! I’ll have to eat my fine words now! Under the table, Kitty, Sally Rose!”

In a moment they were huddled together on the floor, with the spreading trestles round them and the stout oak planks above. The blast was followed by a silence, and in the silence they heard a derisive shouting from the crest of Breed’s Hill.

“Sounds like the lads up there had suffered no harm from it,” murmured Gran, her voice a little steadier now. “That was a cannon shot, I think; most likely from one of their ships. I really doubt they’ll come ashore. Perhaps it would be safe--”