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_
[Illustration]
_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_
1. A Night to Be Young 3
2. In Readiness to March 13
3. Two to Begin 23
4. The Courage to Go and the Feet to Get Him There 33
5. The Great Ipswich Fright 42
6. Fun While It Lasted 53
7. Off to the Wars in Boston 63
8. Saved by a Pipe-smoking Man 75
9. No Clouds on Bunker Hill 87
10. A Tryst with the Enemy 101
11. A Great Secret 113
12. Thunder in the Air 125
13. The World Turned Upside Down 136
14. The Young May Die 147
15. A Terrible Black Day 160
16. Hanging and Wiving 170
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...?”