THE ROAD TO BUNKER HILL

Books by SHIRLEY BARKER

For Younger Readers

THE TROJAN HORSE

THE ROAD TO BUNKER HILL

Poetry

THE DARK HILLS UNDER

A LAND AND A PEOPLE

Novels

PEACE, MY DAUGHTERS

RIVERS PARTING

FIRE AND THE HAMMER

TOMORROW THE NEW MOON

LIZA BOWE

SWEAR BY APOLLO

THE LAST GENTLEMAN

CORNER OF THE MOON

SHIRLEY BARKER

The Road
to
Bunker Hill

DUELL, SLOAN AND PEARCE
New York

Copyright © 1962 by Shirley Barker

All rights reserved. No part of this book in excess of
five hundred words may be reproduced in any form
without permission in writing from the publisher.

First edition

Affiliate of
MEREDITH PRESS
Des Moines & New York

Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 62-12175

Manufactured in the United States of America for Meredith Press
Van Rees Press · New York

For
Esther Doane Osman

Contents

THE ROAD TO BUNKER HILL

Chapter One
A NIGHT TO BE YOUNG

“Nothing ever happens in this town,” said Eben Poore, dangling his long legs over the edge of the wharf, and looking down river to the open sea. The sky was pale, almost white above the long sand bar of Plum Island, he noticed, but the streets were growing dark behind him, and twilight had begun to gather round the warehouses and tall-masted ships by the waterside.

“No,” agreed Dick Moody, “nothing ever happens in Newburyport. Wish we could have a ‘tea party’ like they had in Boston a spell back. I’d sure enough be glad to rig up like an Indian and heave a chest of bohea overside.”

“I guess all the merchants know better than to bring it in,” said Johnny Pettengall. “Nobody’d drink the stuff. We got no name o’ being a Tory town.”

Johnny was older than the other boys, seventeen past. He had his own gun and drilled with the militia on muster days.

“But something has happened in Newburyport,” he went on, “though I don’t suppose it would mean very much to either o’ you.”

“What did happen?” asked Dick lazily. “Somebody’s cat kitten, or Indian Joe take too much rum and do a war dance in Queen Street again?”

Johnny shook his head and smiled. “Sally Rose Townsend’s back,” he said.

The other boys sat up, and their faces brightened.

“I don’t care much for girls,” said Eben, picking a piece of long brown seaweed from the dock’s end and shredding it in his fingers. “But Sally Rose is different. Maybe it’s her hair.”

“Having gold-colored hair never hurt a girl none,” declared Johnny, with the air of a man who knew about such things, a man grown. “But with Sally Rose—well, it’s the way she smiles, I think.”

“I like Kitty better,” said Dick stoutly. “Sally Rose is always grinning—at everybody. When Kitty smiles, there’s some sense to it—when she’s pleased, or you tell her a joke.”

“What’s Sally Rose doing in Newburyport this time o’ year?” asked Eben. “She comes in the summer to visit Granny Greenleaf and her cousin Kitty, but it’s still early spring—April nineteenth, for I took me a look at the almanac this morning. See, there’s the first log raft from New Hampshire just tied up today.”

The other boys looked where he pointed. Through the gathering darkness they saw that a drift of shaggy logs covered the whole surface of a little cove nearby. Lanterns flashed here and there, and a dim shouting echoed among the narrow lanes and small brick houses beside the river. The lumbermen who had brought the raft down from the great forests farther up the Merrimack, were moving about it now, making everything fast for the night.

“It’s been a warm spring,” said Johnny, smiling quietly to himself.

Dick shivered and turned up the collar of his homespun jacket. “Maybe it has,” he said, “but it’s cold enough tonight to freeze your gizzard. Hope there won’t be a frost, with the apple trees already budded and most o’ the fields plowed. But what’s that got to do with Sally Rose? Her father keeps a tavern in Charlestown, shops and houses all round, and the seasons don’t matter. Spring don’t mean nothing there.”

“There’s a lot stirring round Charlestown this spring, Sally Rose says,” continued Johnny. “Looks like the British soldiers in Boston might be ’most ready to come out and fight. We been expecting it, and we got plenty o’ powder laid by, at Concord and a few places more. Might need to use it any time now. Sally Rose’s father thought she’d be safer here.”

“Did she tell you that?” asked Eben quickly. “You’ve talked with her then?”

“Yes, I talked with her,” said Johnny. He turned his dark head a little and looked up the hill at the lighted town behind them, starlight over the dormer windows set high in the rooftops, the church steeple white against the night sky. He seemed to be watching for something. He did not say any more.

A group of sailors swaggered by, jesting and laughing, on their way to the Wolfe Tavern after grog. The spring wind brought a salt smell up from the river, a fish smell, and the clean scent of pine logs from the raft in the cove. One lone candle burned in the window of a counting house nearby and showed them a figure hunched over a tall desk and open ledger. Dick pointed suddenly toward it.

“Shiver my jib and start my planks if I’d want to be a counting-house clerk!” he exclaimed. Dick was apprenticed to his uncle in the ship-building trade, but what he wanted was to go to sea. Eben, an orphan, did chores at a boardinghouse in Chandler’s Lane, and Johnny helped his father on their farm below the town, a farm known for its poor soil and salt hay.

Before anyone could answer him, a girl’s laugh rang out, somewhere in the shadowy streets above.

“That’s Sally Rose!” cried Eben. “I’d know her laugh in Jamaicy—if I was to hear it there! She—she—you knew she was coming down here, Johnny! You knew!”

“Yes, I knew,” said Johnny. There was a light in his eye, a reflection from the counting-house candle, perhaps. “She said she and Kit might take a walk this way, if Granny Greenleaf would let them out.”

“Well, Granny did,” cried Dick, “for she’s coming, and Kitty with her. Look there!”

Two girls came tripping gaily toward them, their full skirts sweeping the rutted lane, little white shawls drawn about their shoulders, their hair brushed back from their faces and falling in curls behind. One girl’s hair was soft brown, and the other’s yellow like Indian corn.

The boys stood up. Johnny went forward. “I been waiting for you, Sally Rose,” he said.

Sally Rose walked slowly toward him, her head lifted, her eyes shining. She put out both her hands. “My, you’re handsome, Johnny,” she said. “I’d forgotten how handsome you were. We don’t have lads like you in Charlestown, you know.”

Johnny gripped both her hands against the front of his jacket and took a deep breath. The other boys looked embarrassed. Eben stared down at his feet. He suddenly realized that they were bare, bare and not very clean. He owned a pair of shoes, of course, but he only wore them on Sundays and in the wintertime.

“Glad you came back, Sally Rose,” he said, not looking at her.

“Oh, thank you, Eben,” she answered sweetly. “I’m so glad that you’re glad.”

Johnny opened his eyes wide and gave Eben an unfriendly stare.

“Hey, Kit,” said Dick, “I haven’t seen you since—”

The brown-haired girl smiled. “You’d have seen me if you’d looked,” she said. “I passed you by the ropewalk last Friday afternoon. I was going to Polly Little’s to bring home some tulip bulbs for Granny. I waved to you, but you wouldn’t see me. You were too busy cleaning a tar barrel.”

Dick looked down at the worn planks of Somerby’s Wharf. It was dark beside the river now, and the only light came from the windowpanes of the small houses along the street.

“I’m sorry, Kitty,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter, Dick,” she answered. Her blue eyes smiled at him. Her voice sounded soothing and kind.

The five of them stood there, silent in the spring night and the sharp sea wind. Johnny shifted his feet uneasily. Even Sally Rose did not know what to do or say.

Finally Eben spoke. His voice quavered a little, harsh, and self-conscious, and high. “If I had a shilling,” he said, “I’d ask you all to come up to the Wolfe Tavern and have a glass of beer.”

Dick snorted. “Lot of good a shilling would do you there!” he said. “Ma’am Davenport’s real strict. She won’t sell drink to lads of thirteen.”

Eben wilted for a moment. Then Sally Rose smiled at him, and he squared his shoulders and stood up taller than before.

“I don’t care for the taste of beer,” she said. “Perhaps I see too much of it in Father’s tavern as it passes over the board. But thank you, Eben. It was a kind thought.”

She turned to Johnny, and her voice grew low and soft. “Will there be a moon?” she asked.

He answered her gruffly. “Not till later. Much later, after the bells have rung curfew; after you girls are home abed.”

“Oh—?” answered Sally Rose provocatively.

“Well, here we are, Sally Rose,” said Kitty in a brisk tone, “You said you wanted to come down to the river.”

She looked out at the dark flowing stream with the river barges and fishing smacks and deep-sea-going ships moored on its quiet surface, lanterns in their rigging, their tall masts reared against the sky, and their sails furled tight. Ships home from Virginia and the Barbados, from all over the world, maybe; their holds full of sugar and rice and wine, silks and laces and oil, India muslins, and French knickknacks, and gunpowder out of Holland—even if they carried no tea. Try as they would, the King’s laws hadn’t been able to interfere too much with trade.

“Now that you’re here,” she went on, “what do you want to do?”

“We could go for a walk through the marshes, Plum Island way,” said Sally Rose, looking at Johnny.

“All of us?” he asked her. Kitty and Eben and Dick ought to know that he meant for them to go away and leave him alone with Sally Rose. But they didn’t go.

“We could all go back to our house and have plum cake and buttermilk,” suggested Kitty. “Granny cut a new plum cake yesterday.”

Eben’s voice rose high and shrill again. “We could play hide-and-seek,” he announced boldly.

Sally Rose giggled. Then she clapped a hand over her mouth.

“That’s only for young ’uns,” muttered Dick. “I be too big for that now.”

But suddenly Kitty defended the idea.

“You’re right, of course, Dick,” she said wistfully. “But then, don’t you sometimes hate to feel you’re getting too big for the things that used to be fun? Eben’s the youngest of us, and he finished school more than a year ago. Soon we’ll be grown and married, with houses and children, and we won’t be able to run out after dark like this, and walk by the river, and watch for the moon. We’ll have to stay in, and rock babies, and split firewood, and see that the doors are locked and the table set for breakfast. It’ll come on us all so soon now.” She looked at Johnny appealingly. “Let’s have one last play night—one night to be young—before we grow too old.”

Johnny’s eyes widened suddenly, and his mouth curved in a smile. Sally Rose had a cluster of apple buds pinned on her bodice, and their sweetness hovered all about. It made him feel sad, and happy, and unsettled as a girl, ready to agree to anything, even Kitty’s daft notion.

“Right enough, Kit,” he said. “For one more night, we’ll be young. We’ll play hide-and-seek, if we never do again. I’ll count first, and the rest of you hide. This’ll be goal, this empty rum keg here.”

He sat down on the rum keg and buried his face in his hands. “Ten—fifteen—twenty—” he began slowly.

With a little squeal, Sally Rose picked up her skirts and ran to hide behind a pile of lobster crates in a far corner. The others hesitated a moment.

“Forty-five—fifty—” went on Johnny, still very slow.

They scattered then. Eben crawled under a ship’s boat, broken and lying sideways on the wharf. Dick ran into a doorway across the lane. Kitty waited until she had barely time to crouch down behind a pile of wooden boxes marked with a black “W. I.”—West India goods.

“Ninety-five—one hundred—here I come!” Johnny shouted. He stood up and peered around him, but only for a moment. In almost no time at all he found Sally Rose, but it was a little longer before he pulled her out from behind the lobster crates. Perhaps he had peeked through his fingers, Kitty thought, so that he knew where to look. Perhaps he kissed Sally Rose before they were in plain sight again.

Anyway, it was now Sally Rose’s turn to count, and she found Dick with little trouble.

But after that they really did seem to be young again, and entered into the spirit of the game. Gradually the counting got slower, and the hiding places farther and farther away. Then Sally Rose and Kitty hid together behind a heap of mackerel nets, and Eben found them both at the same time.

“Tie find! Now which of you’s to count and go seek?” asked Dick, putting up his head in the sharp wind. “Just about once more, and ’twill be curfew time, and we’ll have to go home.”

“I’ll count,” offered Kitty.

“No, let me,” said Sally Rose.

“How about me having a turn?”

It was a strange voice that spoke, a boy’s voice, quiet and cool, but with a mocking note of laughter in it.

They turned around suddenly and stared. There on the wharf behind them stood a tall fellow not much older than Johnny, with a lean face, sharp gray eyes, and sun-bleached hair. He wore cowhide boots and a loose hunting shirt over moosehide breeches. He carried a long pole with an iron barb on the end, such as the lumbermen used to break up log jams and herd the great rafts down the river.

“I’m know I’m a stranger here,” he went on, “but I ain’t poison. I been watching you awhile. I’d like a hand in the game.”

“You came down river with the logs?” asked Dick slowly.

The stranger nodded. “Aye, clear from the falls at Derryfield. A fellow can be lonely—away from his own town at night—first time away.” The sharpness went out of his eyes, and he looked younger, almost like a little boy.

“Of course you can play,” cried Kitty, sympathy in her voice. “I’ve been lonely, too, sometimes, when I went to visit Sally Rose in Charlestown, and I know what it’s like. He can count this time, can’t he, Sally Rose?”

“Of course he can,” said Sally Rose, smiling at the strange lad, flicking her lashes.

Dick and Eben looked crestfallen. Johnny kicked the side of the rum keg. “Didn’t know backwoodsmen could count,” he sneered. “Tell us what your name is, if you want to play.”

The stranger narrowed his eyes, then he opened them wide and smiled innocently. “My name’s Tom Trask,” he said, “and I can count.” He put his head down in the crook of his arm, but they did not hear the familiar “Ten—fifteen—twenty—”

After a moment, thinking he might be counting to himself, they started to straggle away. Kitty did not watch where the others went to. Seconds mattered at a time like this. She slipped behind a row of tar barrels at the corner of the counting house and stood there, listening to the water as it sucked at the piles underneath, to the sound of singing and fiddle music where the sailors were making merry on the deck of a ship moored a hundred yards off shore.

Suddenly the voice of the young logger from up the Merrimack whipped out like the command of the captain to the volunteers who drilled on Frog Pond green come muster day.

“Ten—ten—double ten—forty-five—fifteen!”

He reached his hundred all at once, leaped from the keg, and ran straight toward her, toward her, Kitty Greenleaf, of the High Street in Newburyport, who had never seen him before tonight. He ran to her, around the tar barrels, around the corner of the counting house. In a moment he had put his arms about her and kissed her on the mouth, kissed her hard.

Not used to such sudden attack, not used to kissing any lad at all, except in kissing games where everybody looked on and laughed, or when Dick bade her a shy good night sometimes by the garden wall, she struggled, and sputtered, and pulled away.

She wiped her mouth and looked up. “What—what did you do that for?” she gasped.

The gray eyes were smiling down at her, there in the chilly spring dark, the thin mouth crooked upward in a smile.

“Like I said, a lad’s lonely in a strange town at night.”

Before she could answer, she heard a soft little laugh beside them. She turned about. There stood Sally Rose. Sally Rose flickered her long lashes and opened her hazel eyes very wide.

“There’s no need for you to be lonely,” she trilled. “My, but you’re a handsome lad! We’ve none such handsome lads in Charlestown.”

Tom Trask eyed her coldly. His mouth was still smiling, but his eyes looked sharp and unfriendly in the candlelight that shone through the dusty panes of the counting-house window behind his head.

“Charlestown can’t be much of a place,” he retorted, “though I wouldn’t know, for my business never took me there, and ’tisn’t likely to. But—” He paused a moment, and his head lifted a little. “Up the Merrimack we got prettier girls than you. Maybe a score.”

Sally Rose’s eyes flashed, and she tossed her curls. “I don’t care what’s up the Merrimack. I look pretty enough in Charlestown! Pretty enough to please Captain Gerald Malory of the Twenty-third!”

The logger did not answer her. He turned around and walked slowly down the wharf. Kitty could hear the ring of the iron nails in the soles of his country boots as he strode away.

Chapter Two
IN READINESS TO MARCH

“Insolent plowboy!” exclaimed Sally Rose haughtily. She stood in front of the mirror wreathed with gilt cupids, her palms flat on the mahogany dressing table, and stared at her own reflection, curls loosened and falling over the shoulders of her white cambric night robe, her eyes narrowed and glinting coldly in the candlelight. Then the coldness dissolved away, and she giggled.

Kitty, lying sprawled on the patchwork counterpane that covered the great four-poster bed, giggled too, uncertainly. Sally Rose had moods that changed so fast she was never able to keep up with them. So, as usual, she didn’t try, but spoke her mind in her turn.

“He wasn’t a plowboy, he was a logger,” she said. “Maybe the owner of a whole forest as big as this parish. Some of them are, you know, those up-country lads. And he was too smart for you, Sally Rose. He knew you were making fun of him.”

Sally Rose sat down on the counterpane and hugged her knees. She looked thoughtful. “Yes, he knew,” she said. “But when I said the same thing to Johnny Pettengall, Johnny thought I meant it. Inside, I almost laughed myself to death. I wonder why I couldn’t fool that backwoods boy, when I could fool Johnny.”

“Maybe because he’s older,” suggested Kitty. “He looked older, anyway.” She got up, went to the chest, and blew the candle out.

“Yes,” reflected Sally Rose, “older, but not really a man—not so much as twenty.”

“Is that how old he is?” Kitty demanded. “Come on now, Sally Rose. Tell me all about him.”

“About who?” asked Sally Rose. “The logger? Tom Trask was his name, he said. I don’t know anything about Tom Trask, except that I caught him kissing you. I wonder why you didn’t stop him. If Granny finds out—”

“I didn’t have time to stop him,” retorted Kitty severely. “And don’t try to change the subject. The ‘him’ I want to know about is that British officer. Captain Malory of the Twenty-third.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Sally Rose uneasily. She, too, left the bed, and went to stand between the patchwork curtains at the window. It was nearly midnight. Late moonrise silvered the sky over Plum Island, and the young leaves stirred restlessly in the sea wind, hiding the quiet darkness of Granny’s crocus and daffodil beds in the garden below.

“You know you really want to tell me about him,” continued Kitty. “You always want to tell me about the lads you’ve taken a fancy to.”

Sally Rose did not turn, and when she answered, her voice was very quiet, with none of the usual merry undertones that made it so charming. “Oh, but this is different, Kitty. You guessed right—he is twenty. And Father says he’s an enemy.” She laughed ruefully. “In fact, Father says he’s a damned lobsterback, and I mustn’t see him again. But I sent him a note to tell him where I was going, and maybe.... But how did you know he was British? You only heard me say his name.”

Kitty could feel her face burn in the darkness. She still felt ashamed, though it hadn’t been her fault, really.

“I read it in a letter,” she said with some stiffness, “the letter your father wrote to Granny, telling her why he was sending you here. I went down to meet the postrider, and when he handed me a letter addressed to C. Greenleaf, I never thought that it was for Granny instead of me, and so I read it. Of course she’s Catherine, too.”

“What did Father say?” asked Sally Rose. Her voice had a worried sound.

“It began, ‘My dear,’ instead of ‘Dear Mother’—that’s why I didn’t know it was for Gran, and I kept on reading. He said ‘I’m worried about our little girl.’”

Kitty paused, and Sally Rose did not question her any further just then. Both girls looked through the window, over the roofs of the town, at the wide dark waters of the Merrimack flowing seaward.

Fifteen years ago, about this time of the year, Caleb Greenleaf had taken his wife, Becky, and his married sister, Anne Townsend, for a little jaunt on the river in the April sunshine. The young mothers had left their baby girls with Granny Greenleaf, and gone happily aboard his small fishing boat, and no one had foreseen the sudden mad wind, the squall of snow that would engulf them. Afterwards, Granny had brought up orphan Kitty, but Job Townsend had taken his motherless daughter back to Charlestown to his own people. The tragedy had brought him close to his mother-in-law, however, so that he still addressed her as ‘My dear,’ and spoke of ‘our little girl,’ and there had been much going back and forth between them.

For a long moment now, the girls stared at the dark river. Kitty was the first to take her eyes away. She did not refer to the old, sad loss, of which she knew they were both thinking.

“Your father wrote that he was sending you to stay with us for a while,” she said quietly, “to get you away from that British officer you’ve been stealing out with. He said this—this enemy—puts on a homespun shirt and leather breeches, pretends to be one of our lads, and goes wherever he likes, on all the roads round Boston.”

Sally Rose gave a soft little laugh. “Yes,” she said, “Gerry does that sometimes. But I like him better when he wears his scarlet coat and his sword. He’s sure handsome enough to make any girl forget about Johnny Pettengall.”

There was a prideful note in Sally Rose’s voice as she shook back her yellow hair.

“But he’s British, Sally Rose! He’s one of the King’s men who’ve captured Boston, and closed the port, and made so much trouble for the people who live there. Dick says they’ll march out and start shooting at us any day now. You’d be better off with a New England lad—even that logger.”

Sally Rose sighed. “I know,” she said. “Wars are hard on a girl, Kit. I know I’m supposed to hate the British, but how can I, when they are so handsome—when they have such gallant manners! I’ll bet wars don’t mean a thing to those cupids round the mirror. Love doesn’t know Whig from Tory. But why does he have to be—”

Three sharp taps sounded on the other side of the bedroom wall.

“Granny’s cane!” cried Kit softly, lowering her voice to a whisper. “That means we’re keeping her awake. But there’s so much I want to hear. How you met this Gerry, and—”

“Hush!” breathed Sally Rose, remembering Granny’s outbursts of short-lived peppery wrath. “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

They slipped into bed and lay quiet, side by side, arms relaxed on the counterpane, watching the moonlight along the wall. First Kitty turned over and sighed. A few minutes later Sally Rose did the same. Finally Kitty sat up and punched her pillow. “I can’t sleep,” she said.

“Neither can I,” said Sally Rose. “I feel as if something were going to happen.”

Below them in the town the church bells began to ring.

They rang and rang, and kept on ringing. Kitty could see them in her mind, tossing wildly in their belfry, high over Market Square. She sat up higher in bed. Sally Rose sat up, too, and reached out for her cousin’s hand.

“It must be a house afire,” said Kitty. “Can’t be a ship in trouble. The wind isn’t that strong.”

She jumped out of bed and ran to the window, but no hot glare lit the sky, only the cold pale light of the April moon. Now a noise of shouting broke out in Fish Street, growing louder every minute. Lights flickered behind the windowpanes of the small wooden houses all about, and went on burning, steady and strong. Shadows moved across them. People were getting up.

Kitty turned from the window. “Let’s get dressed!” she cried. “Maybe Granny will let us go and see what it’s all about.” But Sally Rose was already fastening her petticoat.

Pulling large winter shawls about them to hide half-buttoned bodices and yawning plackets, they tiptoed into the hall, but Granny had got there ahead of them. She stood at the top of the stairs, small, and neat, and wizened, looking as if she were ready to go to church on a Sunday morning, her costume complete, even to gold eardrops and a chip bonnet with ostrich plumes. She had a lighted candle in one hand, and her cane, which she carried but seldom used, in the other. She opened her mouth to speak to them, but was interrupted by a heavy knocking on the front door and a man’s voice shouting for Timothy.

Timothy Coffin, Granny’s hired man who tended the garden and split the firewood, came tumbling down from his tiny attic chamber. Gnarled and weathered, not much younger than his employer, his arms were half in, half out of his woolen jacket, and he carried an old flintlock, like himself, a veteran of the siege of Louisburg thirty years ago.

“Git out o’ my way, women,” he shouted, as he tore past them. “I’ll bet it’s them varmints. I knowed they was about to strike!”

Granny peered after him in bewilderment, as he fumbled with the lock of the heavy front door.

“Does he mean the Indians?” she asked. “When I was a girl I used to hear stories—but it seems they’re too scarce hereabout to cause any trouble now.”

Timothy finally got the door open and stood there, listening to a hoarse excited voice that spoke in the dark outside. Suddenly he turned around.

“I’m off, Ma’am Greenleaf!” he called to Granny. “Them British dogs has struck at last. I signed the pledge for a Minuteman. I swore to hold myself in readiness to march whenever I be ordered. An’ I be ordered now.”

“If you’re going far, you’d better take some food with you,” said Granny smartly. “Take all the bread in the cupboard, and the cold chicken—”

“And the plum cake,” interrupted Kitty. “We cut a plum cake yesterday.”

“Where are you going, Timothy? Where did the ‘British dogs’ strike?” asked Sally Rose, her eyes looking large in her white face.

Timothy did not answer her. Instead he ducked into the kitchen. The front door yawned open, and through it they could hear the terrible clamor of the bells, the lift of excited voices as the townspeople hastened by.

“Come, girls,” said Granny. “I aim to learn what this commotion is all about.”

They followed her out of the house and along High Street, past the Frog Pond and the new training green laid out where the windmill used to be.

A crowd had gathered in front of the Wolfe Tavern, and they paused at the outskirts of it. Torches flared all about, lighting up the portrait of General Wolfe that hung on a pole near the tavern door, flickering on the windowpanes along Fish Street and on the startled faces of the Newburyport folk. Fashionable flounced ladies stood side by side with barefooted fishwives from Flatiron Point, while toddlers clung to their skirts, and urchins raced here and there, shouting with shrill voices, as if they played some sort of exciting game. Most of the men were gathered round the tavern’s high front steps, and new arrivals kept elbowing their way forward every minute. The throng bristled everywhere with gun barrels; a flintlock, a fowling piece, an old queen’s arm.

“There’s Johnny,” said Sally Rose suddenly, and sure enough, Kitty craned her neck and saw him standing with the other men, his hands gripping a heavy musket. He was watching the tavern door intently. He did not look their way.

“What’s going on here?” demanded Granny in a querulous tone. Everybody seemed to be talking at once, but nobody answered her.

A man wearing a blue coat and carrying a sword came out of the tavern and stood still at the top of the steps, looking round him. He held up his hand. The urchins stopped shouting. The bells down the street pealed a time or two and then were silent. The voices of the crowd died away. A sudden burst of spring wind lifted a heap of dead leaves from the gutter and swirled it high in the face of the round white moon.

The man on the steps began to speak. “Men o’ the Port,” he called out, in a voice that was low and deep, a voice that without lifting or straining itself could be heard in all the streets and lanes nearby, “New England blood’s been spilt, as some o’ you know. But for them that don’t, I’ll read the word the postrider brought.” He waved a paper aloft, then held it square in front of him.

“‘To all friends of American Liberty, let it be known! This morning before break of day, a brigade consisting of some twelve hundred redcoats ... marched to Lexington ... and on to Concord Bridge. Many were slain both sides, and the roads are bloody. Another brigade is now upon the march from Boston!’”

He put the paper down. “Men o’ the Port, such as signed the pledge, ‘We do enlist ourselves as Minutemen and do engage that we will hold ourselves in readiness to march!’ All such men to the training green! Fall in by companies! Come, lads! Up the hill!”

With a cheer the men surged up Fish Street, shoulders hunched and heads thrust forward, their guns gripped in their hands. With cries of dismay and alarm the women began to trail after them. Granny stood still, leaning on her cane.

“There’s Dick and Eben,” cried Kitty. “Dick!” She lifted her voice. “Dick, come here and tell me where they are going. Dick, are you going too?”

But Dick and Eben were hurrying after the Minutemen. They looked at the girls and waved, and then ran on.

“Ah, here’s Mr. Cary,” Granny exclaimed. “Now we’ll see what all this uproar is likely to lead to.” She trotted over to the minister who was moving swiftly up the street, his wig not quite straight, and the linen bands at his throat somewhat disordered. “Mr. Cary, tell me now, what does all this mean?”

The minister paused, adjusted his wig, and mopped his brow with a lawn handkerchief. “I’m afraid it means war, Madame Greenleaf. It was bound to come. They’ve oppressed us too far. But about this latest outrage—I myself talked with the postrider, and he was there and saw it all. A frightful slaughter!” He looked at the girls and lowered his voice, but they heard him all the same.

“He says that when he left, the whole rout was fleeing back towards Boston, but he heard Captain Parker say that if they mean to have a war, let it begin here. ’Twould seem they so mean, and that it has begun.”

“Who were the redcoats?” asked Sally Rose in a small tremulous voice. “Did he say if it was the Twenty-third?”

Mr. Cary looked at her sharply. “Who knows one redcoat from another, and what does it matter?” he demanded. “But I believe he did mention the Twenty-third. It seems they were not in the thickest of the engagement, but posted out to help their fellow scoundrels home to Boston.”

Sally Rose let her breath escape in a little sigh of relief. Granny tapped her cane on a granite horse block nearby to get Mr. Carey’s attention again.

“Well, what do our lads think to do about it? Why get folks out of bed in the middle of the night? Must we fortify the Port and barricade ourselves in our houses because there’s been a fuss in Lexington? Are the British headed for Frog Pond Green?”

Mr. Cary started to smile and then bit his lip. “Hardly that, but our companies will assemble and march from there. The word’s been passed for such men as are able to bear arms to make their way to Cambridge with all speed.”

“Huh!” said Granny. “Cambridge is a good ways off. I hope Timothy took the plum cake. Come, girls! Now that I’ve satisfied my mind, I’m going home.”

“Oh no, Gran,” pleaded Sally Rose, composed and sure of herself again, now that she felt reasonably certain her British Gerry had come to no harm. “I want to go up to the green and see them off. It’ll hearten them to have us there, to have us wave them good luck as they march away.”

“Nonsense!” snapped Granny. “The lads will have other things on their minds. They got no time now for yellow hair.”

The squeal of a fife and the solemn throb of a beating drum broke through the shouts of the crowd on the training green.

“But I don’t want to go back to bed,” pouted Sally Rose.

“And why did you think you were going back to bed, miss?” Granny demanded. “Parson Cary says there’s a war begun. That means we’ll into the attic and try to find those bullet molds I put away when I hoped we wouldn’t need them any more. They haven’t been used since your grandfather’s time, but I think likely they’re still there.”

Chapter Three
TWO TO BEGIN

“I told you they’d fight,” said the young man grimly, biting the end of a cartridge and letting a thin stream of black powder dribble into the pan of his flintlock. He knelt at the tail gate of the farm wagon that rattled and swayed from side to side as Sergeant Higgs of the Twenty-third drove it pell-mell down the Charlestown Road.

His hat was gone and his red coat in tatters. His white breeches were stained with gunpowder and the blood of the wounded men who lay on the floor of the wagon; stained, too, with the gray earth of this unfamiliar country, so unlike the ruddy loam of his native Devonshire.

“I told you they’d fight,” he repeated. “I been amongst ’em, and I know.”

Nobody answered him, but he heard the roar of musket fire back in the hills, the roar of flames from a burning house in a grove of crooked trees a few yards away. He thought impatiently that it had never taken him so long to load before.

“Shut your pan. Charge with your cartridge. Draw your hammer,” he muttered, as his fingers moved swiftly along the reeking barrel. No old hand at this business of soldiering, he felt reassured to find the phrases of the British Arms Manual fall so readily from his tongue.

The cart rocked and rumbled down a narrow track at the edge of the salt marshes. Moors, clay pits, and scrubby oak trees stretched to the foot of the hillside on his left. To his right, in the middle of the river, he could see the lights on board the man-o’-war Somerset, and beyond them, the low roofs and steeples of Boston. Would he ever present arms on Boston Common again, or offer his own arms in another sort of way to the pretty girls who went walking there? He began to doubt it now.

“Run down your cartridge. Withdraw your rammer.” He was ready at last. He lifted the gun and pointed it horizontally, pointed it, pulled the ten-pound trigger, and at the same instant stiffened his body against the powerful recoil.

Then he heard a triumphant roar as the gun went off, sending its charge of powder and ball in the direction of the pursuing Yankees. Hooray! Sometimes it merely sparked and fizzled in the pan. God send he had hit somebody!

“The Yankees don’t fire like that, lad,” he heard a voice mutter.

Turning his head in surprise, he looked down at a battered veteran who crouched a few feet away, dabbing at a shoulder wound.

“What do you mean?” he demanded. There wasn’t enough of the man’s uniform left to tell whether he was an officer or not. Best be safe and address him so. His voice had a ring of authority, for all it came so weakly from his throat.

“I know.” The older man smiled through bluish lips. “You fire as you were taught, and so do I. Did you ever engage with the Rebels before?”

“Not exactly, sir,” said Gerry Malory of the Twenty-third. “I’ve gone amongst them somewhat—‘incognito,’ one might say.”

“Ah! Detailed for spy duty, perhaps?”

Gerry felt his face flush. I talk too much, he thought.

The dusk was drawing in thickly now, with a little fog winding up from the river. Flashes of light burst out on the road behind him, like fireflies in a hawthorn thicket, all the way back towards Cambridge where the relief regiments under Lord Percy were trying to cover the rout of the troops that had charged so proudly that morning on Lexington Green.

He heard a whoosh in the dull air behind them. “Duck, lads,” he cried, and flung himself down on the floor of the cart. The whoosh turned to a shrill whistle and then to a scream as it passed overhead. Then came a thud and a splash as the heavy ball fell harmlessly on the sludgy ground.

Gerry lifted his head. “Drive like the devil, Sergeant,” he shouted. “Once we get over Charlestown Neck, we’re as safe as the Tower of London. They’ll never follow us under the guns of our own ships.”

“Causeway’s just ahead!” shouted back Sergeant Higgs, whipping the horses.

Gerry stood up and looked around him. They were well down on the narrow neck of wasteland now, between the wide, sea-flowing mouths of the Charles and the Mystic. He could smell the salt air and feel the cool wind on his hot face. Groups of weary red-coated men straggled into the marsh grass to let them drive through. How many had preceded him into safety, how many were left in the running fight behind, he couldn’t tell. But he saw campfires on the smooth green hills above Charlestown village, and he thought longingly of the farms and orchards there, a little more longingly of the Bay and Beagle Tavern and a girl called Sally Rose.

“Not detailed for spy duty?” asked the veteran persistently.

Gerry looked down at him, and he was enough of a soldier to realize that the wounded man wanted to engage in conversation in order to forget his pain. He seated himself on the floor of the wagon and answered evasively.

“No, but I go about sometimes. I like to know what kind of men the Rebels are, and what their country is like. Maybe walk out with a girl and play a prank or two. I be West Country-bred, and not too fond o’ towns and barracks life.” Then he thought of a way to shift the attention to another matter. “But what were you saying about the way I shoot?”

The man grinned. A bit of color had come back into his face now, and the dark stain was no longer spreading on the shoulder of his coat.

“Why, you load and prime your piece and blast away, hoping the shot will tell. The Yankees sight and aim. I saw the man who hit me. Stood up behind a stone wall, looked me over, head to toe, and marked me down. We fire line to line, and they fire man to man. We shoot in the direction of the enemy. They pick a target. That’s why they’ve got us running away.”

You mean they shoot like poachers, thought Gerry. Like poachers after pheasants in the squire’s bit o’ woodland. But he did not say it out loud. Every man’s past was his own, but to keep it so, he had to be wary.

They had crossed the Neck by this time, and the road veered away to the right, circling the foot of Bunker Hill and heading for Charlestown village.

“Don’t hear them firing after us any more,” said Gerry, peering back the way they had come. Some of the sunset red was still left in the sky, and enough daylight for him to see that the road behind them was choked with carts and stragglers, but the whole pace of the retreat seemed to have slowed.

“No, and you won’t hear them again tonight. They won’t dare follow us into Charlestown. Could you hold me up, lad? I do not breathe as easily as I am wont to do.”

Gerry knelt down, got his hands under the limp elbows of the fallen officer, and hoisted him into a sitting position against the side of the cart. The man drew a few painful breaths and then spoke again.

“Thank you for your trouble. I am Captain Blakeslee of the King’s Own.”

“’Twas no trouble, sir,” muttered Gerry uneasily. “I be Private Malory of the Twenty-third.”

The captain’s face relaxed in a smile. “A fine regiment—the Welsh Fusileers. I was a guest when they made merry on last St. David’s day. Ah—it comes to me now. I knew I had seen your face before. Were you not the lad who led forth the goat with the gilded horns? He ran wild, I remember, leaped on the table, and up-ended our wine glasses just as we were going to drink to the Prince of Wales! A ludicrous scene!”

Gerry’s cheeks grew hot in the darkness, and he clenched his fists to keep his shame and resentment down. Yes, he had led the damn goat that according to army tradition preceded the Welsh Fusileers whenever they passed in review. Led, and cleaned it, and curried it, and bedded it down every night in a stable near Long Wharf, and twisted garlands about its horns on parade days. He still remembered the hideous embarrassment of the moment when the beast had escaped him.

Signed up for a soldier, he had, reluctantly, but expecting his share of excitement and glory. Until today he had done nothing save tend that black-tempered goat. No wonder he had fallen into the habit of “borrowing” a captain’s uniform or an American’s homespun breeches and tow shirt, and gone swaggering out amongst the girls in the Yankee villages now and then! A man had to have his pride and sweetness and a bit of sport in life. He had learned to imitate the officers’ pompous speech and attitudes, or to talk with a New England twang. Maybe he’d go for a strolling player when he got home again. Maybe he’d be good at it, he thought. But of course, it was in his blood, and no wonder if he should turn out that way.

The farm cart ground to a stop just as Gerry was about to mutter that it was indeed he who led the goat. Sergeant Higgs leaned over to confer with an officer in fresh white trousers and trim jacket, a man who had obviously taken no part in the fighting that day. Then the officer stood aside, the sergeant pulled sharply on the reins, and Gerry felt the wagon leave the road and go lurching across a field at the foot of Bunker Hill. One of the wounded men sat up. The others began to moan and swear.

“You’re off course, Higgs!” shouted Gerry, forgetting that his barracks-mate outranked him and was entitled to a more respectful salute.

Higgs turned around, his broad face a white blur in the darkness. “I be following orders, Private Malory. We’re to wait by yon hill till the troops clears a way through the town so the boats can take us off. By midnight we’ll all be back in Boston.”

“Thank God,” murmured Captain Blakeslee, and then as Higgs drew up the cart in a little grove of locust trees, he turned to the younger man. “Will you help me down on the grass for a bit, lad? I’ve taken a notion to feel the earth under me. Better under than over.” He gave a weak smile.

“Give us a hand, Higgs,” called Gerry, trying to lift the captain, almost a dead weight this time.

Jack Higgs was six years older than Gerry. This was not his first battle, nor the first wounded man he had seen. The moment he joined them in the bed of the wagon, he thrust his hand inside the tattered coat. Then he pulled it out again and muttered under his breath. For a long moment he stared at Gerry.

“Is—is it bad?” faltered the young private, feeling suddenly afraid, as he had not felt all that afternoon when the Yankees were shooting at him as he retreated down the Charlestown Road.

Captain Blakeslee gave a hoarse cough.

“Bad enough,” said Higgs. “Tell you what, Gerry. Go down into Charlestown and see if you can find a surgeon. Tell him we got need of him here.”

“Put—me—on the ground,” whispered Captain Blakeslee. He lay slumped against the side of the wagon and tried to lift his head, but he was not strong enough.

Together Gerry and Sergeant Higgs got him out of the cart and stretched the limp body on the young grass under a locust tree.

“I’ll go quickly,” Gerry promised. “I’ll come back with the surgeon. I hope ’twill be in time.”

“Good luck to you, lad,” said the sergeant. He was still bending over the wounded man when Gerry hastened off.

The journey proved not to be a long one, but over all too soon. Ten minutes hard running across the fields, a brief encounter, and he came pounding back. Jack Higgs stood leaning against the wagon. He had lighted a little fire of dead boughs, and in its light his usually pleasant face looked somber, his eyes a little sick. He was in his shirt sleeves now.

“They told me I was a fool,” panted Gerry. “Told me no surgeon would come out this far to save one man, or three, or four, when so many lies bleeding there in the town. How is the Captain? Jack—where is your coat?”

Sergeant Higgs motioned toward a dark heap under the locust tree. For a moment he stood silent, then he spoke.

“Surgeons couldn’t ha’ saved him, Gerry—not a whole regiment of ’em marched out here two and two. When I put my hand to him, his flesh was already cold. He was about gone. I knew they wouldn’t come. I only sent you to get you away. You never been in battle, never seen men die before.”

“Your coat—?” faltered Gerry. Not that the coat mattered, but he felt he could not talk of anything that did.

“I laid it across his face,” said Higgs, clearing his throat. “Afterwards. It seemed more decent-like, somehow.”

Gerry sat down on the grass beside the little fire, there being nothing else to do. The moon had risen and was shining wanly down on the hills and pastures, on the roofs of Charlestown village. It made a path of silver across the black bay, a path to the lighted shores of Boston. Lanterns flashed in the midst of it, lanterns on the prows of the boats that were carrying the badly defeated British back to the town they had left so proudly the night before.

Gerry thought how he himself and the rest of the Twenty-third had marched out that morning, fifers playing “Yankee Doodle,” and colors lifting on the spring wind. They had marched inland by way of the Neck, through Roxbury to Cambridge, and so far, it was all a game. But the sport ceased near Lexington where they met their fleeing comrades who had gone to Concord to raid the Yankees’ powder magazine. Powerful grenadiers dropped exhausted and lay like dogs after a hunt, panting, their tongues hanging out. The Marines and Light Infantry scattered helter-skelter across the countryside, while the farmers fired at them from behind every wall and tree.

“Cover the retreat,” his regiment had been ordered, and they had done so, in a running battle all the way back to Cambridge. It was there that an officer had detailed him and his sergeant to help get the wounded away.

And now one of those wounded was dead, Captain Blakeslee. Why should it matter to him, when he had known the captain such a little time? But it did matter. A lump swelled and stiffened inside his throat. Then he looked down towards Charlestown and thought of Sally Rose. But she wouldn’t be there, of course. She had gone to visit her kin in a town called Newburyport, a town in the country somewhere. Her father had sent her away because he thought she was too good for a captain of the Welsh Fusileers. And if he felt that way about a captain, how would he feel about the private who tended a goat in stable and led it out on muster day? How would Sally Rose feel if she knew the truth about him? And then somehow Sally Rose began to dwindle in his mind, and for the moment she did not matter any more. He remembered that he had fought his first battle and come out alive, but Captain Blakeslee was dead, and maybe tomorrow there would be another battle, and he would be the one to lie under the locust tree, under some comrade’s tattered coat.

“Open your haversack, lad,” said Sergeant Higgs, his voice cheery again. “I found a spring on the hillside a bit of a ways off, and I’ve been fetching water to the men in the wagon there. They be all somewhat easier now, and the boats will have us in Boston before long.” He threw another armful of dry branches on the fire. “You’ve salt pork and bread, like the rest of us, so eat up your supper. ’Twill taste little worse for the fact that good men be dead, and we lost the day.”

“I know we were driven back,” murmured Gerry, obeying the sergeant and taking out his small parcel of food. “But didn’t the troops get the Rebel stores they went for? Didn’t they get to Concord before...?”

Higgs nodded. He had run the point of his bayonet through a lump of thick, greasy-looking meat and held it over the fire. “Oh, they got there, all right,” he said. “But they’d been better off if they’d stayed in barracks, according to the way I heard. They broke up a couple of cannon, rolled some powder kegs into a millpond, and burnt a house or two. Then they was routed. But ’twould be a different story if the Yankees would come out in the open and fight like men.”

“They seemed to be in an almighty rage about something,” said Gerry, beginning to toast his own meat, keeping his eyes away from the shadow under the locust tree. “And they had no sort of uniformed army. Men in shirts and leather breeches, just as they’d come from the plow or workshop. Well, all spring we’ve been sure there was fighting ahead of us. Now it’s begun.”

“Yes,” said Jack Higgs, looking out at the dark shapes of the rescue boats that crossed and recrossed the moonlit water. “It’s begun, and it took two to begin it—we and they. But at the end—there’ll be left only one.”

“And it better be we!” Gerry felt his own features soften in a smile.

He put up his head in the sharp night air and heard the bugles sounding on the peaceful green crest of Bunker Hill. They were British bugles, and they reassured him. For the last hour or so, he had been sure he would never have the heart to go forth disguised and playing pranks about the countryside again. But now it seemed to him that perhaps he might.

Chapter Four
THE COURAGE TO GO AND THE FEET TO GET HIM THERE

“Not that way, child!” cried Granny warningly. “Lord o’ mercy, Sally Rose, take care!”

Sally Rose stood by the huge brick fireplace in the raftered kitchen and stared desperately about her. In her hands she held a hot iron kettle full of molten silver-gray lead. It was too heavy for her to hold any longer, and she saw no place to set it safely down. Kitty would have figured out ahead of time what she meant to do with it, but not Sally Rose.

“Let me help you,” cried Kitty, jumping up from her place at the heavy oak table where she had been preparing the bullet molds while Sally Rose heated the lead. She reached her cousin’s side a second too late. The kettle tilted dangerously and fell from Sally Rose’s loosened fingers, just missing the yellow flames beneath. It lay on its side at the edge of the wide hearth, its contents spilling out harmlessly in a gray film over the rosy old bricks, sinking into the cracks between them.

“I’m sorry, Gran,” said Sally Rose contritely.

Granny sniffed. “Sorrow butters no parsnips,” she retorted. “Well, it’s no use crying over spilt lead, I suppose. That’s one batch of bullets will do no harm to the British. But it’s a mercy you didn’t burn yourself or set the house afire.” She straightened her muslin cap and smoothed her plaid apron with thin, blue-veined hands.

Kitty let her glance rove out of the window, at the gooseberry bushes in the kitchen garden and the moist brown seedbeds where Timothy had been spading yesterday. His old hickory-handled spade still leaned against the garden wall. No telling when he would use it again. Timothy had taken his gun and gone to Cambridge, and it seemed like half the town had gone with him. Even boys not much older than herself, boys like Johnny Pettengall. She still didn’t know about Dick, but then, Dick didn’t have a gun, so he’d probably be down at the shipyard, just as he always was. She’d make some excuse to go by there, later in the day. She wondered about the strange lad from up the Merrimack. Maybe, since the war was in Massachusetts Colony, the New Hampshire men would think they had no call to go. Still, with his keen eyes and sharp jaw, he looked like he’d be wherever there was a fight going on. She heard Granny’s brisk voice calling her attention back to the kitchen.

“I suppose you’d better run down to the gunsmith’s, Kitty, and fetch me some more pig lead—all he can spare. Sally Rose, you and me’ll get the bake ovens going. Uncle Moses Chase came by here awhile back, and he says they’re gathering supplies to send by oxcart—enough to feed the lads for a few days: hams, flour, meal, salt fish and cooked victuals; lint and medicines, too, in case—who told you to take your apron off, Sally Rose?”

“Don’t you think I’d better go with Kitty?” asked Sally Rose eagerly. “Lead’s apt to be heavy, you know, and—”

“What she can’t carry, the shop will send after her, I don’t doubt,” replied Granny. “Sally Rose, you start yourself for the flour barrels. Take half rye and half cornmeal....”

Sally Rose pouted. Kitty knew she was pouting, although she did not look at her. She tied on her new chip hat with the velvet roses, and hastened through the garden, into the street.

“Kitty, take off that hat and put on your old serge hood!” Granny called after her. “It looks like there’ll be a shower any minute.” Kitty pretended not to hear her.

She walked down the hill into the town, past Mr. Dalton’s mansion house and the Wolfe Tavern. People still loitered about in little groups, but last night’s excitement seemed to have given place to a quieter mood, uneasiness, anxiety, perhaps fear. The shoemaker stood in front of his gabled shop, a wooden last in one hand and a strip of purple kid in the other, talking to a grizzled old man who peddled clams in Water Street.

“No, we’ve heard no more,” he was saying. “No more o’ the Concord Fight, or our lads that marched away. Whole colony’s up, though. Half Essex County’s gone, the stage driver says, and the men way out west beyond Boston are moving in from their side. Hope to squeeze the British in between.”

“Aye,” said the peddler. “The Hampshire lads has started across the river, too. Some by ferry, and some with smacks and dories, and they say there’ll be more. The word’s gone inland, way beyond Rockingham.”

“You mean they’re going to make cause with us and fight the King’s men?” asked the shoemaker, twisting the strip of purple kid in his hand.

The peddler nodded. “They’ve long been sworn to. And everywheres now, them as was undecided whether to go Whig or Tory has got to make up their minds. You’ll find things’ll be different, now blood’s been spilt.”

Kitty walked on, and the words echoed disturbingly in her head. The street sloped sharply down to the water, with shops along both sides—the milliner’s, the baker’s, the butcher’s—shutters down and doors wide open, just as on other days, but nobody seemed to be buying anything. Most of the shopkeepers, like the shoemaker, had joined the uneasy groups in the street outside.

The gunsmith’s shop was in a narrow lane behind the church, and when she reached it, she found its door tightly barred and a crude sign dangling from the latch. Gorn to Cambridj till further notiz, the sign said.

She stood there uncertainly for a moment, and looked about her. The soft gray sky seemed to match her own mood, uncertain whether to pour down rain or let the sun shine through. Between the houses she could see the waters of the river, a darker gray. Not all the men had followed the gunsmith’s example, for busy crews were working about the wharves and slips, hammers rang from the shipyards, and the tall chimneys of the distillery lifted their plumes of smoke, just as if it were an ordinary morning. Somehow the sight reassured her. She’d go and look for Dick, she thought, and make sure that he hadn’t run off with the Minutemen. Then she’d go home and tell Gran about the gunsmith, take off her hat, and get ready to help with the baking.

As she passed the sailors’ boardinghouse in Chandler’s Lane, she noticed Eben in the backyard chopping wood, and she called to him. He straightened up, looked at her for a minute, then put his ax down and came over to the board fence.

“What are you after, Kitty? ’Tisn’t no use looking for Dick,” he said.

“I don’t know that I was looking for Dick,” said Kitty tartly, chagrined because Eben had read her mind so plain. “But now that you speak of him, I don’t suppose he’s off for Cambridge, too?”

Eben nodded solemnly. “Ye-a, Dick’s gone.”

Kitty felt shocked in spite of herself. “But how could he? He doesn’t have a gun.”

“He’s got a tomahawk,” said Eben. “Tomahawk they took out o’ his great-grandmother’s head when the Indian tried to scalp her up in Haverhill in ’96.”

“Why, I know that old thing,” cried Kitty. “It’s duller’n a hoe. We played with it when we were children. Might as well try to fight with a warming pan!”

Eben shrugged. “Colonel told him to come along,” he said. “Told him there’d be men there was poorer armed, he didn’t doubt. Said the courage to go and the feet to get him there was all he’d really need.” Suddenly he fell silent. He looked down at his own bare feet and stubbed one great toe in the moist earth.

Kitty felt a little shaken. So Dick had gone off to fight the British. Dick, that she’d played with when they were toddlers and he lived in an adjoining house on High Street. How excited they had been, that day when they first found out they were big enough to scramble back and forth over the low fence. And now he had taken his old tomahawk and marched away, a man with other men! And she was left here to do Gran’s bidding, just as if she were still a little girl. But she did not feel like a little girl. She felt sad and tremulous and excited, as if she had the weight of the world on her shoulders, and still, a little happy in spite of it all. Maybe this was the feel of growing up. Maybe last night when they played hide-and-seek had really been their last night to be young, though they hadn’t known it then. Mostly, she thought, we never know when we do anything the last time.

She suddenly realized that a soft rain had begun to fall, cooling her checks and gathering mistily in her hair.

“Eb—en!” shouted a buxom woman from the back steps of the boardinghouse. “Take in my washing off the line! Step lively there!”

Eben muttered, and his face burned crimson as he walked away.

Kitty looked after him for a moment, and her heart stirred with quick sympathy. It must be hard for Eben to be left behind to do such humble chores while his friend had gone off to war and been accepted as a man. The soft drizzle turned into a downpour. She thought, belatedly and with some alarm, of the roses on her hat. She turned and hurried back to Market Square and up the hill, walking with her head bent because of the rain, trying to shield her finery with one lifted hand. So it was that she did not see him until they almost collided under the tavern sign that hung on a long pole high over the sloping street. Then she caught her breath and stepped back, and looked up into the eyes of Tom Trask, the logger from Derryfield.

He stood there, bareheaded in the rain, and he wore the same hunting shirt and moosehide breeches, but he was not smiling now, though his gray eyes lighted with recognition.

“Playing games on the dock tonight, Miss Kitty?” he asked her, and in spite of his sober face, his voice had a teasing note in it.

She smiled and shook the rain from her lashes. “How did you know my name was Kitty?” she asked him.

“Heard ’em call you that times enough—last night, I mean, whilst I was looking on.” His eyes smiled now, but his mouth remained a thin line. He seemed to be waiting for her answer.

“No,” she said. “We’re not often so silly, and besides, I doubt if the rain will stop. And even if it did—there are hardly enough of us left to play.”