Chapter VI: Part 6

The cannon boomed again. Now another cannon spoke out, a little to the left. Then another. There were no silences any more, only the steady booming, and with every fourth or fifth boom, the tavern shook. One after another the windowpanes began to shatter. Once they heard a great crash in the street.

They did not speak to each other, for no human voice could penetrate the din. Kitty watched a streak of sunlight slowly widen and move across the floor. It told her that time was passing, and that this was a clear, bright day.

After awhile a lull did come, and the cannonading died out into silence. The silence was broken by a heavy knocking on the street door.

Gran’s eyes snapped and her face hardened. “’Pon my soul, no stranger is going to catch me hiding under a table, cannon or no cannon--nor my granddaughters, either. Kitty, go and see what’s wanted.”

She got to her feet and smoothed her apron. Sally Rose followed her and stood still, her eyes wide with fright, her lips trembling. Kitty went to open the door.

A gnarled old man stood there, holding a wooden bucket in each hand. He pointed to the tavern sign and then opened his mouth in a toothless grin.

“Lass,” he inquired, “are ye doing business today?”

“Yes,” said Kitty steadily. “I guess we are.”

“Good. Will ye fill these pails with water for me. The lads has need of it on the Hill.”

“Come in,” said Kitty. She took the two pails through the kitchen to the garden well. When she returned with them, there were half a dozen other men waiting, and they wanted water, too.

The guns began again with a new fury. Gran and Sally Rose had stepped into the garden, and when Kitty returned there after the men had gone, she found them staring up the hill.

A small, square earthworks stood on the green crest that had been bare at twilight. Small figures of men were working all around it, digging up turf, building it higher, stringing a wooden fence in front. Other men passed to and fro over Bunker Hill and the highroad that led to the Neck. Every now and then a column of dust shot skyward as a cannon ball plowed into the earth. But the men who were busy about the earthworks paid no attention to the cannon balls.

Now and then there would be a moment’s pause in the firing, and that gave Gran and the girls a chance to speak to one another.

“What’s going on up there, and where are the British?” demanded Gran. “Did those water boys bring you any news, Kitty?”

“It’s just as you thought,” said Kitty hurriedly, knowing that the guns might interrupt her at any moment. “The ships are firing at us from all three sides. The lookouts say there’s a commotion in Boston, but it’s too early to tell yet what they mean to do. They say there are about a hundred people left here in the town, but there’s such heavy firing across the Neck they doubt that we can get away.”

Just then there came a hail from the kitchen doorway, where a man stood with two empty water buckets. Gran went to talk with him herself, this time. When he had gone, she spoke her mind to the girls.

“Nobody up there’s got time to be hungry, it seems, and they’ve plenty of strong drink amongst them, but two of their great hogsheads have been shot open, and the need’s for water. Sally Rose, you stay by the windlass and keep turning. Kitty, you carry the pails to the taproom to save the men the journey out here. Fill every tub and bucket and keep them full. I’m going to the roof to see for myself whatever there is to be seen.”

It seemed to the two girls that the morning would last forever, as the sun toiled upward toward noon. Sally Rose ground at the windlass and swung the heavy buckets over the stone curb where Kitty’s hand received them and carried them inside. Round and round, back and forth, round and round, less like women of flesh and blood than like two parts of some wooden machine. They did not talk much together. They had not the breath for it, nor very much to say. Now and then Kitty looked up the hill to the earthworks, the tiny, gallant redoubt. The men were still toiling to reinforce it, and a man in a blue coat strolled fearlessly along the parapet as if he were telling them what to do.

It was about noon by the kitchen clock when Gran came down stairs. Her face was grim. “Girls,” she said tensely, “leave your work and come with me. I want you to see a shameful sight. I want you to see the King’s soldiers coming out with guns against the King’s loyal people.”

The Bay and Beagle was a square-built house of red brick, three stories tall, with a white railing about its flat roof. Gran led the girls to the side facing Boston, half a mile away. Kitty gripped the rail with both hands, though she would have liked to put them in her ears, the cannonading had become so much louder, the spaces between the blasts so brief and few. Sunlight sparkled on the blue river and on the three great ships pouring forth constant broadsides of fire. Flames leaped forth from Copp’s Hill, from floating batteries in the ferry way, and over all hung a mist of grayish white smoke.

“Look there,” hissed Gran during a quiet interval, quiet except for the jangling bells of Boston that were doing their best to make their steeples rock.

Kitty and Sally Rose let their glances follow her pointing finger, to the docks that lined the opposite shore. Two lines of barges were moving out on the full tide, one from Long Wharf, and one from the North Battery. They rode low in the water, being full to the gunwhales with soldiers clad in white and vivid scarlet. The sunlight gleamed on the steel of bayonets, on the brass mountings of the great black guns. It was a gorgeous and yet a terrible sight.

All Boston seemed to go mad with the frantic clamor of bells. Shouts and cheers rose from its crooked streets that wandered up hill and down, and somewhere a band was playing. Its rooftops were black with tiny figures who had climbed there to watch the King’s troops move against the King’s people who felt they had always been loyal to him--so far.

When the two rows of barges reached midstream they drew near to each other and then moved forward in two long lines, side by side, like pairs of marching men. They seemed to be headed for Moulton’s Point. Kitty watched them till they passed out of sight around a curve of the shore. Then she turned to face Gran and Sally Rose.

“Do--do you think they’re going to land?” she asked.

“Sakes alive, child,” answered Gran, “I don’t know what they mean to do, but we’ll go back downstairs and see if we can find out. There are sure to be more men coming after water.” She glanced up the hill toward the redoubt. Only a few figures moved about it now, but clouds of dust rose everywhere, thrown up by the impact of cannon balls, and the smoke from the guns themselves drifted that way. At that moment a handful of men appeared on the top of Bunker Hill, coming from the direction of the Neck. More men followed them, and still more. In orderly fashion they marched toward the redoubt where they were greeted with a faint cheering.

“Looks like more of our lads had come to help,” said Gran, as she led them down the narrow stairs and into the taproom. Just as she had suspected, three water carriers waited there, and all the pails and tubs were empty.

“Gran,” whispered Sally Rose, “I--I just don’t think I can turn that windlass any more.”

Gran looked at her keenly. “It makes the arms ache, I know,” she said with surprising sympathy. “Kitty, you go to the well for a while, and let Sally Rose carry the buckets.”

And thus their morning chores began all over again, though it was already early afternoon.

At the end of her third trip between well and taproom, Sally Rose stopped to talk to Kitty in one of the rare intervals when no gun was going off.

“Kit,” she said wanly, “I--I’m frightened, Kit. Do you think Gerry’s coming in one of those barges? Do you think he’ll have to shoot at our lads on the Hill? Do you think he might shoot at me?”

Kitty had been wondering almost the same thing, but she would not tell her cousin so.

“If you’re going to think about a lad at a time like this,” she said, “why don’t you think of Johnny? You’ve gone about with Johnny for a long time, Sally Rose, and Johnny’s on our side. Don’t you wonder if maybe he isn’t up there--in that earthworks on the Hill? Right there in the thick of the cannon balls?”

“Well, I do wonder about Johnny,” she answered plaintively, “and about Dick, even about that New Hampshire boy with no manners--Tom what’s his name.”

Kitty, too, had wondered about Tom, but not too much. There was a cold certainty in her heart that Tom Trask would be in the thick of whatever fighting there was to come. She knew that as well as if she could see him there.

“Girls!” called Gran’s voice from the kitchen door. “Girls! come here to me!”

Kitty let go the windlass suddenly, and the handle spun creaking round. Sally Rose set down her pail.

Just then there was a loud whine somewhere overhead, and then a whoosh, a shower of splinters about them, and a roaring wind that flung them hard against the turf. For a moment they lay there, not daring to move. The smell of burning powder filled the air. Then another roaring wind went by, but not so close, and higher overhead.

Kitty sat up. A cannon ball was bouncing across the grassy yard of the house next door. It had passed through the garden and shattered the pointed roof of the well-house where they stood. She reached out and grasped Sally Rose by the shoulder.

“Quick,” she gasped. “Let’s get inside. They’re firing into the town, not just at the earthworks any more.”

Racing into the taproom, they found Gran in talk with a tall man who wore an officer’s coat and three-cornered hat and did not carry a pail.

“Girls,” said Gran, her voice frighteningly calm, “the British have landed, and ’tis plain they mean to charge the Hill. Whether they can take it or not, we don’t know. But they’re shooting straight into Charlestown now, iron balls and iron cases full of burning trash. The town’ll soon be in flames over our heads. ’Tis time to leave. There’s nothing more we can do.”

A moment later they were in the street outside, trailing along after a sorry-looking group of men and women, poor folk, mostly, who had stayed in town in spite of all the warnings of danger, because they had nowhere else to go.

“I’m glad,” murmured Gran as they plodded over the cobblestones, their eyelids smarting and their throats choked with the thick smokiness that seemed to be flooding over the whole world, “I’m glad we sent Timothy to Cambridge, two days back--Timothy and that poor horse, too. At least, we’re leaving no living thing behind to burn.”

Kitty thought of all the living things who were left to their fate in that tiny fortress on the Hill.

Iron shot blasted the roofs about them, and balls of living flame burst in the street. All along their way the old wooden houses were beginning to catch fire. Just as they passed out of town and into the green country at the rear of Bunker Hill, Kitty looked back. Clouds of black smoke billowed upward from the docks, the warehouses, the dwellings, the shops in the market square. The church steeple lifted up one soaring pyramid of fire.

Her eyes hurt suddenly with tears that did not come from the smoke.

“Come away, child,” said Gran, putting her arm about the girl’s shoulders, using her other hand to guide the half-blinded Sally Rose.

How far they had gone before the little procession came to a halt, she did not know, but she did know they toiled a long way down the dusty road, constantly shelled by the heavy guns of the ships.

When they did stop, it was in the front dooryard of a little tavern, The Sign of the Sun. The raggle-taggle company scattered themselves about on the grass, but Gran led the girls inside.

“They say the firing’s too heavy for us to cross the Neck and flee inland,” she explained, “but ’tis to this place they are bringing the wounded men. Perhaps we can help here.”

The taproom they entered was not unlike the taproom at the Bay and Beagle, but tables and benches had been moved back to clear the floor. Some dozen men in tattered shirts and bloody breeches were lying on the wide pine boards. Some moaned, and some lay very still. Three women worked among them, and a man in a buff coat, a doctor, most like, knelt by one soldier probing a wounded knee.

Gran looked around her. “There’s water and bandages on the counter over there,” she said. “Get to work, Kitty, Sally Rose.”

If the morning had seemed long, it seemed that that afternoon at the Sign of the Sun would never go. Kitty knelt and swabbed and tied bandages and held whiskey to men’s lips to ease their pain when Dr. Eustis’ probe went deep. Sally Rose and Gran were doing the same thing, too.

Then the men came in so fast there was no room for them in the tavern, so they were laid in the yard, and all about the garden reaching up the hill. The air was full of booming sound and smoke, and over all burned the hot, hot sun.

The British had charged the Hill and been driven back, she heard from the men she tended. The British had gathered themselves together and were about to charge again.

She and Gran and Sally Rose were working over two men with shoulder wounds, trying to staunch the flow of blood, when Gran suddenly stood up and put her hand to her forehead. A strange look came across her face. Then she smiled, and the light in her eyes paled out and dimmed away.

“The young may die,” she murmured, “but the old must.”

She tottered and fell beside the soldiers on the bloody grass.

“Dead. Stone dead,” muttered Dr. Eustis, kneeling above her a few moments later. “Her heart failed from the shock and strain of this day, I do believe. But she died with her hand to the plow. She died like a good soldier.”

Sally Rose crouched on the steps of the tavern, put her head in her lap, and burst into uncontrollable weeping. She never moved from there the rest of the afternoon. After Gran’s body was carried to a chamber over the taproom, Kitty looked desolately about her for a few moments. Then she went back to tending the wounded men. She would do what it was needful for her to do.

Word came down the hill that the British were driving on the redoubt, that powder horns were getting low.

Sometime after that--she never knew how long--Kitty knelt beside the newest soldier to arrive. His head was bloody, and he wore a rough shirt and breeches like all the rest, but on his feet were the fine polished boots worn by the men in the British Army. When she washed the blood away, she found she was bending over Gerry Malory.

_Chapter Fifteen_

A TERRIBLE BLACK DAY

“We be going down this hill now,” said Colonel John Stark, “to fortify and hold the rail fence there.”

He stood out boldly on the bold bare top of Bunker Hill, his new blue and buff coat unfastened at the neck, his musket held lightly but warily in his hand. His New Hampshire troops were drawn up before him, farmers and woodsmen for the most part, and dressed as befitted their callings. They wore homespun shirts and breeches dyed in the sober colors of late autumn, after the red and gold are gone. They carried a variety of weapons: here a fowling piece made by a village blacksmith; there an ancient queen’s arm left over from the Siege of Louisburg thirty years ago; there a blunderbuss older than Plymouth Colony.

Tom Trask, who carried the blunderbuss, looked past his colonel at the whole of Charlestown peninsula spread out before him in the early afternoon sun. Below, on Breed’s Hill, that Prescott’s engineers had made the surprise decision to fortify, stood the redoubt. He could look down into it, just as if he were standing in the top of a tree. The men had built wooden platforms to fire from, and they were massed and waiting behind their guns. Farther down, on the point of land between the sparkling blue rivers, the scarlet pride of the British Army sprawled on the grass eating its dinner.

Stark went on, his voice low but piercing, a tenseness in it that made a man’s blood run hot with courage, rather than cold with fear. He gestured toward the shores of the Mystic, the side of the field away from Boston.

“To the left of the redoubt, lads, you can see a rail fence, and Knowlton’s men have banked it with cut hay. But past the rail fence there’s an open stretch along the river, wide enough to drive a team of horses through. We’ll go down there now and build a stone wall across it. Isn’t a man among you don’t know how to build a stone wall.”

He paused and looked proudly around him. “And when it’s built, we’ll take our stand there, there and along the fence, and fight. If there’s a man among you don’t know how to do that, he can go home.”

The road back to the safety of Medford lay broad and smooth behind them, but nobody turned toward that road. They started to cheer, but the colonel held up his hand.

“Wait till you got something to cheer for, boys,” he said. “But remember this--all! Don’t shoot till they be within fifty yards. Pick out the officers. Fire low, and aim at the crossing of their belts. Hit for the handsome coats and the commanders.”

He lifted his head and stepped back. Tom stood close enough to see his burning eyes and the unflinching line of his mouth. “I don’t know how the rest o’ you feel,” Stark went on, “but for myself, I’ll fight to the last drop o’ blood in me. By the great Jehovah, I mean to live free or die!”

“Fall in!” he shouted. He held up his arm and made a swooping motion toward the rail fence. The New Hampshire regiments followed him down the hill.

Once on the narrow strip of muddy beach beyond the fence, they worked desperately to rear a wall across it before the British should come on. Some fetched stones from other walls that divided the pastures on the hillside. Others toiled to heap them in a bulwark straight to the water’s edge. Tom was with those who carried boulders flung from the bank and piled them ready to the builder’s hand. Once he climbed up the ledge himself to take a look at the field above.

“Hey, Caleb,” he called eagerly, as he noticed a young man standing where the rail fence ended, a musket in his hand.

Colonel Stark’s first-born son, sixteen-year-old Caleb, turned around and a grin broke over his lean face as he recognized his old hunting companion. He stepped forward.

“Tom!” he exclaimed. “Haven’t seen you since you left for Newburyport with the log raft, back sometime in the spring.”

“No, I ain’t had a chance to get home. Ever since Concord Fight I been in camp. Where you been?”

“Round home mostly. Just got here this morning. Word’s gone all around the countryside that the British be about to attack. Figured my dad could use another man. Say, Tom, Jean’s been asking about you--”

Fife and drum music burst forth from the red-coated ranks below the hill, and the bugles uttered an urgent cry.

“Here they come!” yelled Tom. He leaped down the bank and ran to where he had left his blunderbuss, in the center of the stone wall.

Crouched behind it, he watched the British come on. He could not see the field above him that sloped upward to the redoubt, and ’twas likely the heaviest charge would be there. But there were plenty of red coats and white breeches moving toward the New Hampshire line. Once the attackers stopped and reformed in groups of four. Then on they came.

Just to his right a musket spoke, though they had received no order to fire. Tom lifted his own blunderbuss, but before he could pull the trigger Colonel Stark strode fearlessly between the opposing armies. He had a tree branch in his hand. With a sharp stab he thrust it into the earth.

“Don’t another man fire till they pass this stake. Whoever does, I’ll knock him down,” he said.

He looked around him to make sure his words were understood. Then he walked back to his own line as calmly as if he were going down to his sawmill on any summer afternoon. Behind him the advancing British fixed their bayonets. He leaped down into the shelter of the wall.

When the word came, Tom was ready, and his blunderbuss spoke punctually as the British passed the stake. He could not tell how many times he fired, and he did not stop to see what damage he had done. Aim, fire, load. Aim, fire, load. He kept relentlessly on, scarce conscious that all around him other men were doing the same. He knew that the ground in front of the stone wall was covered with wounded and dying redcoats, but their line kept still coming on, and so long as it did, he would do nothing but fire, load, aim.

As he had been told, he aimed at the handsome coats and the commanders. Once when he lifted his eyes to choose the next target, he saw, to his utter amazement, a man he knew. Captain Gerald Malory was advancing toward him, bayonet in hand. As he looked, his amazement turned to contempt. “Polecat!” he muttered. “Said he was captain. Done it to dazzle the girls, I’ll warrant.” Gerald Malory wore a private’s uniform. Turning away deliberately, Tom leveled his gun on a resplendent major. When he looked back again, his one-time prisoner was gone.

The British line wavered and fell back. He could hear the shouts of the officers trying to rally their men. They lifted their guns and fired a volley, and Tom heard the shots whistle high above.

“Gunning for hen hawks, maybe,” he told himself with a grin. “Won’t hit nothing else that high in air.”

Now the red-coated line was drawing back, retreating down the beach toward the point from whence they had come. Now there were no redcoats within firing range any more.

“Whew!” said Tom. He put down the blunderbuss and mopped his forehead. Now he took time to look around him.

All along the New Hampshire line men were standing up to stretch, drinking water out of leather bottles, and beginning to move about and talk together. He did not know the grizzled oldsters on either side of him, but he soon learned they were veterans of the Indian War, and no strangers to powder and shot.

“Think they’ll be back?” he asked, waving his thumb in the direction of the retreating British.

His companions nodded. They were starting already to reload.

Down at the open end beside the water lay a confused heap of wounded. Those who could still stand up and walk were helping to carry their less fortunate fellows away. The word went round that a hospital had been set up at The Sign of the Sun, a tavern on the back side of Bunker Hill.

There came a hail from the bank above. Tom turned that way and recognized the shaggy gray head and sturdy figure of Old Put. The general was mounted on a horse, and had several other blue-coated officers with him. Colonel Stark and three of his captains strode over to the bank, and the two commanders talked for a long time. Then Stark walked resolutely back to the stone wall, with his head lifted, his gaze fixed straight before him. Old Put’s party rode off toward the redoubt.

A bugle sounded far down on Morton’s Point. Once again the British must be coming on. Tom crouched and leveled the blunderbuss. Just then the man on his left leaned over and spoke.

“Word’s gone down the line,” he muttered through a thick wad of tobacco, “that Johnny Stark’s lost his boy.”

“Caleb? How?” gasped Tom.

“Stopped a British ball somewheres up by the fence, they say.” The man spat brown juice on the trampled mud. “Don’t like the look o’ things, lad. My powder horn’s getting low.”

“So’s mine,” said Tom numbly. He looked between the stones at the oncoming scarlet line. He knew the depth of quiet love that lay between that father and son. “When they told Stark--what did he say?”

“Said he had no time now to talk o’ private affairs,” answered the veteran. “Look there, in the front ranks of ’em! That’s General Howe. I fought under him at Quebec in ’59. I’d know him anywhere.”

Tom looked where the other pointed, but he did not see the proud pompous figure of the British general leading on his men. He saw instead a New Hampshire mountainside in the fall, young Caleb Stark walking under the golden beech leaves, with his head up, laughing in the crisp air. He saw Caleb skating on Dorr’s Pond in the winter moonlight; pitching hay on a summer afternoon. And now at the rail fence Caleb lay dead. By Jehovah, he’d fix the British for doing that to his friend.

“Here they come, lad,” warned the man at his side.

“I’m ready,” said Tom. He gripped the blunderbuss, and all his rage and vengeance sounded in the roar of it as it spoke.

The British were not so easily beaten back this time. Stepping over their fallen comrades they marched up to the wall, staggered back at the withering blast of fire, and came on again. But at last their officers could no longer urge them forward. Once more Tom found himself staring at the redcoats fleeing away.

It was a long time before they formed again, and the whole American line was jubilant. It began to seem as if a handful of farmers with nothing but courage and gunpowder had turned back the British Army. Tom climbed up the bank in the interval and took a look at the redoubt. It was untaken, and there were still, red-clad forms lying all over the slope before it, and the gleaming brass of abandoned artillery. In front of his own line the dead lay as thick as sheep in a fold.

“We ought to send for more powder,” he muttered, as he went back to his place and loaded the blunderbuss. “More men, maybe.”

“Prescott already sent for more men,” growled his neighbor. “Been sending for ’em all day. Ward keeps ’em all close to Cambridge because he thinks they’re in danger there. As for powder, there was only ’leven barrels in the whole camp this morning. Bet there’s powerful little of it left by now.”

“I got three more loadings,” said Tom. “I’ll give ’em that. Then I’ll have to bash their skulls if I bring ’em down.”

“Bash their skulls then,” said the older man. “That’s as good a way as any for the varmints to go.”

When the British made their third charge, they sent only a token force against the rail fence. Their main attack was directed at the redoubt. Tom fired his last charge of powder and then flung himself over the bank to the field above. Many other New Hampshire men were doing the same, their powder likewise being gone.

At his side he saw Hugh Watts, who had driven with him to Cambridge after the lead.

“Bad news for the colonel,” said Watts.

“Aye. Bad news for everyone who knew young Caleb,” answered Tom with a gulp. “He was a friend of mine.”

“Hope they got enough powder up there on the Hill,” the Londonderry man went on. “Don’t seem as if they’re firing as lively as they should.”

Tom looked again at the redoubt. Black smoke was pouring up the sky from over Charlestown way. The main force of the British was driving toward the little fortress, coming dangerously near. Now they passed the wooden fence. Now a handful of them began to swarm up a locust tree that stood in one corner of the earthen wall.

“Great Jehovah!” gasped Hugh Watts. “They’re going in!”

It was true. A last frantic burst of firing came from the redoubt, and then its guns were still. The British poured over the low walls in a triumphant scarlet wave.

“No more powder. Or they’re all dead,” said Tom grimly.

“Out, lads!” he heard Captain Moore calling behind him. “Spread over the field from Bunker Hill to the river and cover the retreat!”

* * * * *

Tramping back across Charlestown Neck in the sunset with the last straggling ranks of the Great American Army, Tom Trask slowly began to realize that he was not the same Tom Trask who had marched out so confidently to Bunker Hill. He had seen and heard too much that afternoon to remain the same. He had seen the King’s troops firing at him, and he had fired back, and he wanted no more of England and the King.

When the bells began to ring in Newburyport last April and he heard the news of Concord Fight, he had gone to camp because all the other men were going. Only a cripple or a coward would stay at home. But he hadn’t thought much about it, much about why there had been this Concord Fight.

He’d learned a little more from the talk around the campfire at Winter Hill, but nobody seemed to be sure whether they were fighting to make the King treat them better, or to get the country away from the King. Well, for himself, he was sure now. He knew when he heard John Stark say, “I mean to live free or die.” For that was the way he meant to live. He knew it for sure when he heard the news that Caleb had been shot.

And he had good hopes that the time would come when he could live that way. Hadn’t he seen the British Army turn and run--turn and run away twice?

“We’ll fight them from now till Judgment,” he muttered to himself. “But we’re going to be free.”

A little group of his dusty, tattered fellows came toiling up and overtook him where he plodded along, trailing the empty blunderbuss. One of them hailed him, and he saw that it was Johnny Pettengall.

“Hey, Tom! We almost licked ’em, didn’t we?” he called. “If our powder’d lasted one more time.... Where was you?”

“At the rail fence and along the wall,” said Tom.

“I was in the redoubt.”

“We got slaughtered there,” said Tom.

“Aye, many slaughtered,” agreed Johnny, falling into step beside him. “We was bayoneted like so many cattle. This’ll be remembered forever in New England as a terrible black day.”

“I guess it will,” Tom said.

“I saw them shoot Dr. Warren,” continued Johnny. “Shot him in the head just as he was leaving the redoubt.”

“I seen him once in Cambridge,” muttered Tom. “He was a good man, I guess. It’s worse for me that we lost young Caleb Stark.”

“The Colonel’s son?” asked Johnny, and his face brightened. “Oh no! That was a false report, Tom. I heard Putnam himself telling Prescott that. Said he was sorry the boy’s father ever got the word--but it didn’t make no difference in the way he led his men. He said Stark’s a soldier all the way through. Likely you and Caleb will be drinking beer together tonight on Winter Hill.”

Tom drew a long breath. He looked out at the blue hills to the west, with the red hot ball of the setting sun behind them. He was glad that his friend was alive, but the good news hadn’t changed his mind about one thing. He still wanted to live free.

_Chapter Sixteen_

HANGING AND WIVING

“Do you feel afraid now we’re really here?” asked Kitty. She put her hand to Gerald Malory’s sleeve with a light, possessive touch and looked up into his face anxiously. Gerry smiled down at her.

He still wore his country clothes and a bandage round his head, but the healthy color was coming back into his face now. She had tended him for a week at the field hospital below Medford Bridge, and for a week after that he had been able to go walking with her in the sunshine every afternoon. She and Sally Rose slept at the house of Mrs. Fulton who directed the hospital. But Sally Rose was making new friends, and spent less and less time among the wounded men, even though Gerry himself was there.

“Not half so afraid as I was that night we went back to Charlestown to dig up the silver,” Gerry said.

They stood in the highroad in front of the old Royall House where Colonel Stark had his headquarters. In a few moments they would go in. Gerry would confess that he was not a New Hampshire man who had got knocked on the head at the rail fence and couldn’t remember what company he came from. He would admit that he was Gerald Malory of the Twenty-third. But they would not go in just yet. It was a soft summer night with the fragrance of garden flowers in the air. He drew her down beside him on the low brick wall.

“What were you afraid of that night?” she asked him. “When we went to The Sign of the Sun to get a pass from the British major so we could go into town, I thought he seemed like a very kind man.”

Gerry grinned down at her. “He was kind to you, certainly. From the look in his eye, he’d have given you Boston Common and Long Wharf too, if you’d asked for them. You’ve a way with us menfolk, Kitty.”

Kitty let her long lashes fall across her cheek, then she looked up at him suddenly and smiled. “Do you know, it’s the strangest thing, I do seem to have a way with them lately. But before I knew you, I never had any way with them at all.”

He cleared his throat and looked away from her. “Yes, you’re blooming out, my girl,” he said.

Kitty sighed happily. “Oh I do hope so! For so many years nobody noticed me at all beside Sally Rose.”

“Ah, Sally Rose!” he muttered. “Honestly, I feel guilty there. How am I ever going to tell her that I--that I--have taken a fancy to you, Kitty?”

“Is a fancy all you’ve taken?”

“A deep down kind of fancy.”

“Oh!” She was silent for a moment, and then she said, “If you feel guilty about Sally Rose, how do you think I feel about Tom Trask, the New Hampshire boy? How am I going to tell him I’ve taken a fancy to you?”

He did not answer, and after a moment she repeated her earlier question. “What were you afraid of when we went to Charlestown that night? It was sad, really, but I didn’t see any reason to be afraid.”

She remembered the forlorn look of the town, its cellar holes still smoking, only a few old houses left near the millpond, the moss on the gravestones scorched away. But they had found and brought back the silverware.

“I was afraid I might be recognized and sent to rejoin my regiment. You know I don’t want that to happen to me, Kitty.”

Kitty slipped out of his encircling arm and jumped to her feet. “I know,” she said. “That’s why I coaxed you to come and tell the whole thing to Colonel Stark. If he says you can stay here and be an American, then you’ll have no more cause to be afraid.”

“Suppose he says I’m a deserter and an enemy, and ought to be hanged on Cambridge Common? He may even think I’m a spy, Kitty.”

He stood up and held out both his hands. “I don’t think he’ll do that,” said Kitty slowly. “Colonel Stark ought to understand any man who wants to be an American. You can’t go on pretending always--always being afraid.”

They heard a throat cleared sharply on the other side of the low wall.

“Don’t you young folks have any other place to do your courting?” asked Colonel Stark.

Gerry turned quickly round, and Kitty drew a deep breath.

“We--we were on our way to consult you, Colonel--about a small matter.”

Colonel Stark inclined his head. “Come inside then,” he ordered. “I trust the young woman has no complaint against you.”

“Oh no!” cried Kitty in embarrassment and alarm.

The three of them walked together up the broad graveled path between the boxwood hedges, and in at the wide front door. Kitty had heard much about Isaac Royall, the owner of the house, a rich Tory who had fled to Boston, but she was not prepared for the carved elegance and panelled wainscot of the great hall. She had never before seen a room like the white and gold parlor where Colonel Stark seated them. It reassured her a little to see his somewhat battered musket leaning against the rosewood desk, a cartridge box flung down on a brocade chair.

“O’erlook the disorder if you will,” he said, picking up the cartridge box. “I been at Cambridge all day, and Molly’s housemaids are forbidden to meddle with my field equipment. Well, lad,” and he turned to Gerry, his mouth severe, but a twinkle in his cold blue eye. “You say you come here to see me about some matter.”

“Yes sir,” said Gerry, clenching his fists and leaning forward. “Colonel Stark, sir, I been abed in your field hospital ever since the battle at Charlestown. I said to all that I came from New Hampshire, but since I was wounded I couldn’t remember my town or the name of my captain. I told a lie, sir. I am Gerald Malory of the Twenty-third.”

“I know it,” said Stark quietly. The twinkle in his eye deepened.

“You--you know it? How?”

“Haven’t forgotten you was our prisoner after the Ipswich Fright, have you? I won’t question you about the Fright too much. That’s water under the bridge. Might have enjoyed it myself, when I was a lad.”

Gerry hung his head, and the Colonel went on. “You was recognized by more’n a dozen men when we carted you back from the Hill.”

“Then--why?”

“Why didn’t we clap you back in gaol again? Well, maybe we should have. I decided instead to have you watched. I wanted to find out your game.”

“I haven’t any game,” said Gerry miserably.

“So it was beginning to seem,” agreed Stark. “What are you? Tired of fighting? A deserter?”

“I--I suppose so,” said Gerry. “I never meant to be a soldier. But after I got in trouble at home, it seemed the best way.”

Stark cleared his throat. “You got a father?” he asked.

“A father? Yes, sir.”

“At home in England?”

“Yes.”

“How do you think he’d feel if he knew you was behaving so?”

“I don’t believe he’d care,” said Gerry. “After my mother died, he took a young wife and has other sons. New one every year. ’Twas getting so there was no room at home for me.”

Gradually, under the Colonel’s shrewd questioning, Gerry Malory’s whole story came clear. Kitty had heard much of it before, but not all. He told about his mother, the strolling player; how after her death he had left grammar school, and ranged with a wild group of friends about the farms and the town. Then he was taken up for poaching in the squire’s woodland--caught the first unlucky time he set a bit of a rabbit snare. And the recruiting sergeant came by in the thick of the trouble, and there you were. No, he wasn’t a captain and never had been. He never thought pretending to be one was a dishonest trick, since he never gained thereby. He thought it was like taking a part in a play, and better to choose a leading part. He wasn’t even twenty years old, as he had said; wouldn’t be eighteen till next December came.

Stark pondered. “All that I can see,” he murmured. “I been a lad myself, though, thank God, none such a foolhardy one. But after the battle--what did you do with the boots you wore when they brought you in, the boots that went with your British uniform?”

“My boots?” asked Gerry. He looked down at his feet. He was wearing a pair of cowhide shoes Kitty had bought for him at a shop in Medford Square. “Why, I don’t know what became of my boots.”

“I hid them,” said Kitty defiantly. “I was afraid--if the doctors thought he was British--they’d just let him die. I pulled them off, and took them outside, and threw them down the well.”

Colonel Stark slapped his knee and laughed with a quiet, wry kind of mirth. “So I suppose from now on the water at The Sign of the Sun will taste o’ British leather,” he said. Then he turned to Gerry. “Well, a spirited lass is none so bad to have for a wife. I got one myself. Do you mean to marry her for her kindness to you--if you don’t have to hang, of course?”

“Not for her kindness,” said Gerry Malory firmly, his eyes lighting. “I mean to marry her--well, because I mean to marry her.”

“Well enough said,” agreed the colonel. “But I mentioned the other, the hanging matter. Can you think of any reason against it?”

A tragic look came over Gerry’s face, and his voice took on a deep vibrant note of pleading. It seemed to Kitty that she could see and hear his actress mother there.

“You wouldn’t hang a man for a mistake, would you, Colonel? A mistake that was made a hundred and fifty years ago?” He paused and shut his eyes dramatically.

Colonel Stark gave Kitty a slow, solemn wink, and she knew that he was thinking of the actress mother, too.

“What was the mistake, lad,” he demanded, “and who made it? You weren’t making mistakes a hundred and fifty years ago. Yours were all ahead of you then.”

“It was an old ancestor of mine, sir, who went down to the docks in Plymouth and thought to sail with the folk who came here to found your own Plymouth Colony. He thought he would come with them and be an American, but he changed his mind and went back to Barnstaple, and the family’s been there ever since. That was the mistake he made. If it hadn’t been for him--I might ha’ been fighting on your side in this war.”

Colonel Stark gazed sharply at the young man and saw what Kitty hoped he would see: that for all the pretentious manner, the words were true. Then he turned away for a moment and stared through the window where the moonlight was turning white flowered stalks to silver in the garden.

“My folks didn’t make that mistake,” he said abruptly. “They come here on a ship, like all the rest of us, except those who be Injun bred. Come out o’ Scotland, my folks. Had five young ones die on the voyage, and raised another five to replace ’em. Yes, your ancestor made a mistake, lad. But how do you think to right it? Peace time, you could come here like other Englishmen always did, and settle down and be one of us. But not now, now that we be at war.”

“Couldn’t I, Colonel? That was what I was hoping for. It’s not that I’m afraid of fighting. But I don’t want to fight against you. And I can’t fight against my own.”

“And what would you do, Private Malory, if I said, ‘Go to! Clear out of my camp and make your way as best you can?’”

Gerry’s face lit up, and there was no play-acting about him this time. “Why, I’d thought about that, Colonel. Do you know what I’d do? I sailed from Plymouth myself, for my regiment took ship there, so for old times’ sake, I’d take the highroad and go down to your Plymouth in Massachusetts, and see if I could make my way there and settle in, and become a Plymouth man.”

“We got a Plymouth in New Hampshire,” said Stark thoughtfully. “I don’t know whether all the land be taken there or no.” Then the lines in his face hardened.

“I got the power tonight to send you on your way,” he said. “Tomorrow, I may be plain Johnny Stark, headed back to the sawmill again. We got a new commander coming up from the South to take over the whole army. Name o’ Washington. A Virginia man. Can’t tell what he’ll do.”

On that July night the name of Washington meant nothing to Kitty Greenleaf and Gerald Malory.

“Then let me go, Colonel Stark. Let me go tonight,” Gerry pleaded.

The colonel looked down at the rich woven rug on the floor. His eyes seemed to be tracing the scrollwork pattern. Then he turned to Gerry again. “There’s only one thing still bothers me, Private Malory,” he said. “I believe you when you say you’d like to be an American, and settle down in America and make your way there, and do no harm to anyone. I commend you for it. But how do you feel toward your own people? Don’t you believe in Parliament and the King?”

“I believe in them--over there,” said Gerry slowly. “But not over here. They rule fine in England, it seems to me. But in America--the way I’ve come to see America--they don’t know what they’re doing at all.”

Stark’s grin told Kitty that he had heard the answer he wanted to hear, but he had one more word of caution. “Remember, you been knocked in the head, lad. Are you sure you know what you’re about? That you won’t wake up in a daze some morning and wish you was back with the Twenty-third?”

“No,” said Gerry. “I won’t wish myself back.”

Stark got to his feet. “Might happen,” he said mildly, “if you was to slip out of camp long about midnight, sentry would be looking the other way.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Gerry fervently.

“Thank me in ten years,” said Stark, “if you still want to then. It’s a crazy venture, and we can’t tell how it’ll turn out. But if it’s what you want, get on with it. They say hanging and wiving goes by destiny. And I guess you’re lucky in both o’ them matters, lad.”

He led them toward the front door, and as they passed by a small parlor opening off the hall, Kitty caught sight of a couple inside it. They sat on a peacock-colored sofa, locked in a deep embrace. Startled at the sound of footsteps, they drew apart. Stark shot a quick look in their direction and grinned widely. “No harm in it,” he said, “they’re a betrothed pair.” He would have kept on down the hall, but Kitty stood still, gasping.

The man on the blue sofa was Tom Trask, and the girl was a stranger to her; small and delicately formed, with a beautiful cameo face and shining red hair. Under their scrutiny Tom stood up. Some men would have been embarrassed, but not he. He scooped the girl to her feet and led her forward.

“Well,” he greeted them, “so it’s Kit herself, and _Private_ Malory. I’d like you to meet Jeanie Morrison.” He looked down at the red-haired girl, and there was a tender merriment in his eye.

“I kissed with all the girls some,” he continued. “But I always knew I’d marry Jean.”

“Listen to the man!” trilled Jeanie. She gave him an enchanting smile that showed a dimple in her cheek.

“Jeanie come down from Derryfield with my wife a few days back,” explained the colonel, sensing some tension in the air he could not understand. “She came to see Tom and bring him his gun. A Brown Bess, British made, one of the best guns in the army.”

“Aye,” said Tom mockingly. “I got my own gun. You can have your blunderbuss back, Kitty. I’ll bring it to the hospital tomorrow.”

“Don’t bother,” said Kitty, but Gerry’s eyes lighted.

“Is there any way we could get it tonight?” he asked.

Kitty knew what he was thinking, and she saw the rightness of it. He meant to go to Plymouth, armed with the Plymouth blunderbuss.

Tom shrugged, “If you want it that bad,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I brought it with me. You’ll find it standing among the lilacs to the right of the front door.”

After they had retrieved the old weapon and taken their leave of Colonel Stark, they walked quietly through the streets of Medford hand in hand.

Kitty should have been relieved that she would have no painful scene with Tom, but she could not help feeling rueful at the knowledge that he had preferred red-haired Jeanie all the time.

“You’re lucky,” Gerry assured her. “I wish--I wish I could get out of it so easy with Sally Rose.”

He kissed her on the steps of the Fulton house.

“I don’t know when I’ll be back, Kitty,” he said. “It may take me a long time to make my own way. And you--now your grandmother’s dead, where will you go?”

“I think I’ll go back to her old house and wait till you come for me. You’ve never been to Newburyport, but you can find the way. You’ll be gone tomorrow, and I’m going to Cambridge and get old Timothy and take him home.”

“Will Sally Rose go with you?” he asked.

“What do you think?” said Kitty. “Look there!” She pointed to the parlor window just to the left of the front door.

Sally Rose was standing inside the parlor. She was smiling up into the eyes of a tall young captain who wore the blue and white of the Connecticut line. She let her lashes veil her eyes and opened her pretty lips. “We’ve none such handsome lads in Massachusetts--” she said.

Gerry Malory swallowed. Then he began to laugh. “Where, oh where,” he exclaimed, “have I heard those words before?”

After he had left her, Kitty slipped into the house and up to the little chamber that she shared with Sally Rose. She went to the window and stood there, looking at the still town, and the moonlit river, the campfires on Winter Hill, the lights of the warships far down the dim bay.

Less than three months back, it was, that they had all played hide-and-seek in Newburyport, but they would never play hide-and-seek again. Never again would they be that young.

Even she and Sally Rose, Gran had said, would be great-grandmothers some day. How glad she was that Gran had had that last cup of tea.

She turned from the window and began to undress, laughing as she remembered the struggle to get Sally Rose out of the stays. Never again, she thought, would they be as young as that.

She was just climbing into bed when Sally Rose opened the chamber door.

“Kitty,” she said, “there’s going to be handsome men in uniform about for ages. Captain Davenport was just telling me that he expects a long war. He says that since Bunker Hill, the word’s been in everybody’s mouth that we’re going to live free or die--and that will take a long time.”

“Live free or die? What does that mean?” asked Kitty, bewildered.

“Well, I don’t understand it myself,” said Sally Rose, taking the ribbon out of her curls, “but I have an idea of one man who might know. I think you’ll be likely to find out if you go and speak to Tom Trask.”