you got here. I’ll carry the news straight to Stark. He’ll be the man
to tell. He’ll know what steps to take. You was smart, Kitty, to tell
me. May make a big difference--to both sides. Don’t suppose you’ve got
a horse about?”
“Indeed we have,” cried Kitty, relieved that she had told her
disturbing secret and eager to be of further help, if that were
possible. “There are two horses in the barn that belong to Uncle Moses
Chase. Sally Rose and I brought them from Newburyport. Gran says
they’re eating their heads off, but she hasn’t sent them home. But
they’re only plow horses.”
“Kind I’m best used to. Like the gun, I’ll see you get it back some
day.” He stroked the blunderbuss that now accompanied him everywhere.
“Don’t know when I’ll see you again Kitty. Not here, likely. If the
British are aiming to come this way, you folks will have to go.”
“Oh, we will. Just as soon as I can talk to Gran and Sally Rose. Back
to Newburyport, perhaps. Why don’t you come to see us there?”
“Can’t tell. Looks like I’ll have some fighting to do first. Glad you
took our side and told me that British fellow’s secret, instead of
hiding his little plan for him.”
A startled look came over Kitty’s face. “Why--why, I did betray Gerry,
didn’t I? I--I never thought of it like that.”
“’Course you betrayed him. You’re too good a Yankee to do aught else,
as I can see. Good-by, Kitty.”
He strode into the kitchen on his way to the garden and the barn behind
it.
The last thing he heard was a triumphant squeal from Sally Rose.
* * * * *
Colonel John Stark of the New Hampshire line was not in his quarters
that night, but walking among the tents on the hillsides above Medford,
talking with his men. After the long ride from Charlestown, Tom Trask
felt weary and breathless when he finally caught up with his old
neighbor.
The colonel stood in a grove of oak trees where a little brook drained
down. All along the brook the crude sailcloth tents clustered very
thick. Campfires were burning low now. Some of the men lay sleeping on
the ground beside them. Others were playing cards, jubilant when they
could fling down the ace to take the queen. Stark was talking with a
couple of grizzled veterans who had fought beside him in the Indian
wars, but he broke off when the younger man came panting up.
“Where you been, lad?” he asked, and clapped Tom on the shoulder.
“Couldn’t believe it when Moore reported you missing. Shut up in gaol,
maybe? I know you got some good reason for being away.”
Tom could not bring himself to look at the keen blue-gray eyes and
sharp, viselike face.
“I been raiding the islands with some of Putnam’s men,” he muttered.
“But on my way back tonight, I heard a word in Charlestown you ought to
know.”
“You got no business raiding islands, nor being in Charlestown,”
snapped the colonel, all the warmth and friendliness gone from his
voice. “Get back to Captain Moore, and tell him where you been. He’ll
deal with you.” He turned away.
Tom nerved himself to step forward and pluck the sleeve of Stark’s new
blue uniform.
“Colonel Stark, sir,” he stammered. “You know what I heard in
Charlestown? It come straight from a British captain, what I heard.”
The colonel turned toward him again. “What was it?” he demanded.
Tom lowered his voice. No use in alarming the men. “Oh, a very great
secret it was, told in confidence to a girl. This captain said that the
British mean to move out of Boston before the week’s end. They mean to
seize and fortify either Dorchester Heights or Bunker Hill.” He paused
expectantly.
John Stark uttered a mirthless ha-ha.
“I know,” he said. “Seems like you be about the forty-first private to
come up and tell me that. The word’s spread wide, from here to Jamaica
Plain.” Then he shook his head. “Too bad you done what you done. I’d
ha’ liked to ha’ recommended a sergeant’s knot o’ red for your shoulder
when I sent you back to Captain Moore.”
_Chapter Twelve_
THUNDER IN THE AIR
The bells were sounding midnight in Medford Steeple, turning Tuesday
night into Wednesday morning, when Tom Trask tied his borrowed horse
to a nearby fence and lay down beside the dying campfire of his own
company. After the rebuke by his colonel and another one next day by
Captain Moore, he hardly expected John Stark to send for him within a
day or two, but that was what came about.
Stark was holding a conference with a handful of his captains in the
little hollow between Plowed Hill and Winter Hill. It had probably been
a green valley once, but now the young grass was all trampled away, and
so was a field of what had started out to be Indian corn. All about
stretched the tents and crude wooden shelters of the New Hampshire men.
The colonel was in his shirt sleeves, and his lean face looked grimmer
than usual. He had no smile of greeting, but he did not seem to be
angry any more.
“See you brought your horse, Tom, like I said. Was surprised when ’twas
reported to me you owned such an animal. They’re scarcer’n hen’s teeth
around here.”
“I only borrowed him, sir,” replied Tom quickly. “Borrowed him in
Charlestown. He belongs in Newburyport. When I can, I mean to return
him home.”
“Don’t hurry about it,” replied the colonel. “See that cart over
there?” He pointed to a heavy wagon, empty, three young men standing
close by. A horse was fastened between the shafts of it, but he was a
lank, ill-favored nag and looked scarce able to go.
“Yes, sir,” said Tom.
“Then take your critter over to help the other one pull. General Ward
has promised to issue some lead to us, if we send to Cambridge for it.
That’s Peter Christie, Hugh Watts, and Asa Senter who are going with
you. Good lads. I knew their folks in Londonderry before I was grown.
Be as quick as you can about it, too. We haven’t got enough powder and
ball to scare off a herd of deer, let alone the British Army.”
“Yes, sir,” said Tom again. He waited for further instructions, but
none were forthcoming. Colonel Stark turned back to his worried-looking
officers. After a moment Tom led his horse over to the wagon.
The Londonderry men were indeed good fellows, he soon found out, used
to the same life as he. They had fished in the same streams and hunted
over the same mountains, knew as little about books and high living,
as much about how to plant corn or cut down a white pine so it would
fall the right way. And soon they were all singing crude old-fashioned
country songs as they drove along the winding road.
Tom looked westward across the pleasant farms to the faint blue line
of hills beyond them, and he thought of the unseen army that was
supposed to be circling tightly all around Boston, an army of men
like himself and the Londonderry boys. Some said it was ten thousand
strong, and some said twenty, all the way from Medford River to Jamaica
Plain. He thought of that other army, swaggering through the streets
of Boston; men, he supposed, like that redcoat captain he’d brought
home in chains a while back--and nobody knew what strength they had.
He remembered Kitty’s warning that the British meant to strike by the
week’s end. Well, here it was, Friday, June sixteenth, and the weather
hotter’n the burning roof of hell. If the British were coming, they’d
better be on their way. Maybe they were on their way. Everybody in camp
was worn out and restless with expecting them, but nobody seemed to
know.
Just then his horse gave a neigh, laid back its ears, and stood still.
Perforce, the other horse halted, too.
“Must ha’ seen a rabbit,” said Hugh Watts, peering over the side of
the cart into the thick grass that grew beside the road. “I don’t see
anything but ripe strawberries, though. Think we could stop to pick a
few?”
Asa Senter shook his head. “Wouldn’t hardly dare it,” he objected.
“Stark wants us to go and get back. By the look o’ the sun, it’s
already six o’clock, and we still got about another mile.”
Tom leaped down from the wagon. “I don’t think it was a rabbit,” he
said. “He acts more like there was thunder in the air.”
“Not a cloud anywheres that I can see,” said Peter Christie.
“Don’t have to be.” Tom patted the horse’s flank and started to lead
them ahead. “If there’s thunder somewheres over back, a critter’ll
always know.”
“Feel a bit uneasy myself,” said Asa, getting down to walk beside Tom.
“Look! There’s a steeple and some roofs sticking up through the trees.
Cambridge must be just ahead.”
There were a sight of mighty fine houses round Cambridge Common, Tom
thought, as they approached it. Big square mansions, some of them; some
with gambrel roofs, mostly painted yellow and white. But he didn’t see
any of the sort of folk who looked as if they lived in the houses;
pretty women with flowers and jewels, or gentlemen in velvet jackets
wearing swords. The roads that led to the Common were thronged with
soldiers like himself, in cowhide shoes, leather breeches, and tattered
tow-cloth shirts, with bandanas round their heads; and all too many,
for his taste, had a short-stemmed pipe gripped between their teeth.
They all seemed to be excited about something.
He had no trouble in getting the old Hastings house pointed out to
him, but he was unable to lead his horse anywhere near it because the
crowd was so great. They seemed to be having some sort of muster on the
Common, for men were drawn up in rank there, maybe a thousand or so.
“What’s a-going on, Tom?” Peter demanded.
“I don’t know,” said Tom, “but I aim to find out. You boys stay here
with the cart, and I’ll go over to General Ward’s and ask. We got to go
there anyway to get the lead.”
He left his companions and made his way forward till he reached the
rail fence before the dwelling house that had been pointed out to him
as the headquarters of the Great American Army. A row of Lombardy
poplar trees stood up tall and pointed behind the fence, and just as
Tom elbowed his way to the gate, a man came out to stand before the
wide front door.
First there was a loud shouting, and cheers, and then a hush. The
seething mass of men around Cambridge Common stood very still.
The man in the doorway was not General Ward, surely, for he wore a long
black gown with flowing sleeves and a square-topped cap such as Tom
had never seen before, with a tassel hanging down. But two other men
stood behind him in blue coats and three-cornered hats, and they were
officers, right enough.
However it was the black-clad man who spoke, loudly and clearly, so
that as many as possible might hear.
“I, Samuel Langdon, President of Harvard College, am here to assure
you that the hearts of our little community go with you in your heroic
venture. With you go the hopes of Massachusetts, and the future,
perhaps, of our whole great country. I am here to bless your going out
and your coming home. May His strength uphold you when your need is
greatest, His spirit restore you when you falter, and His truth abide
in you always. My sons, let us pray.”
Tom whipped off his cap, bowed his head, and closed his eyes, aware
that hundreds of other men were doing the same. But his throat
tightened and he heard no more of President Langdon’s prayer. This was
the beginning, he thought. Concord Fight hadn’t been anything to what
this would be. At Concord Fight they had all come a-running, just the
way men come when the word goes out that a house is afire. But this was
like when a whole town got together by plan and moved out against the
French or the Indians. Concord Fight had been a fight--just that--but
this wouldn’t be a fight, what was coming now. It would be a battle. It
would be a war.
“_Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori_,” finished Dr. Langdon soberly.
“It is sweet and fitting, my sons, to die for one’s country.”
He lifted his eyes and stood silent, looking over the heads of the
company, straight at the small square bell tower of a church across the
way.
Everyone began to talk at once, it seemed, and in the uproar Tom thrust
open the gate that led to the Hastings house and crossed the lawn to
the back door. Lilac trees grew close to it, and here, away from the
glare of the sinking sun, the air was fragrant and cool. A young man in
a trim blue coat sat at a table just inside the door.
“Lead for Colonel Stark?” he replied to Tom’s question. “Yes, he’s to
have a supply our men cut out of the organ pipes in the English church
across the Common. Trouble is, I can’t think for the minute where ’tis
stored. Suppose you come back tomorrow.”
Tom pulled a tendril off a grape vine that grew on a trellis over the
door and began to chew it. “Stark wants me to bring it back tonight,”
he said.
The young officer sat up and surveyed him insolently.
“Stark may not know it, but there’s a war beginning,” he announced.
“Yes,” agreed Tom. “There is. That’s what he wants the lead for.”
Suddenly they were both laughing.
“You’re right, man,” answered the young officer in a friendlier tone.
“We’re all on edge, and it takes us different ways, I guess. But I
still don’t know where the stuff has got to, and I’m afraid we can’t do
anything till Prescott takes his force out of town, which he’ll do as
soon as it’s dark enough. Come back a little after nine.”
“Where’s Prescott going?” Tom asked.
The officer laid his finger across his mouth. “Prescott knows--and
nobody else has any need to. Have you got rations, lad?”
“No,” said Tom, “we come empty-handed. Three others besides me.”
The officer wrote rapidly on a slip of paper.
“Here. Take this to the head of the Common when you hear them blow a
bugle up there. Give it to the mess sergeant, and he’ll see you have
some supper.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Tom. He went back to where he had left his
companions.
He found them sitting along the top rail of a fence while the horses
cropped the wayside grass.
“Did you find out what’s afoot, Tom?” asked Hugh Watts eagerly.
The men in the streets were thinning out, but those on the Common,
though no longer drawn up at attention, still remained there.
“Oh, there’s a war beginning, and nobody knows where the lead is,”
said Tom, flinging himself down on the grass. “Didn’t find out a thing
beyond that.”
“We did,” said Asa. “After the man got through praying, we asked
around. Seems Colonel Prescott’s taking out twelve hundred men with
packs and blankets and a day’s ration. There’s a fatigue crew along,
and picks and shovels like they mean to fortify. Nobody knows where.”
“It’ll either be behind Dorchester or Charlestown,” said Tom. He
thought fleetingly of Kitty, and the yellow-haired minx, and the
gallant old woman. He hoped they’d got safe away, but he didn’t think
of them long. “There’s the bugle,” he said. “Let’s go get supper.”
Supper in Cambridge camp that night, for such men as did not have
regular rations, consisted of a slab of salt fish and a hunk of hard,
grayish bread, served with a noggin of sour beer. After the boys had
eaten they walked about the town, down to the red brick buildings of
the college, filled now with soldiers instead of scholars, and into the
gray flush-board English church to see if by any chance the lead was
still there. The church was full of Connecticut men who were using it
for barracks, and they knew nothing about the lead at all.
By nine o’clock the twilight had gathered thickly about the little
town, and the men on the Common formed in ranks and began their march.
Two sergeants walked ahead carrying dark lanterns, half open so as to
throw the light behind. Then came two blue-coated officers, Colonel
Prescott and Colonel Gridley, then the rest of the detail, made up of
Massachusetts and Connecticut men. Tom was not surprised when he saw
that they took the Charlestown Road.
“Bet they’re going to fortify Bunker Hill,” he told his friends.
“They’re carrying entrenchment tools. Wouldn’t bother with them if
the British had already struck. Must be we mean to get there first
and beat them to it. You go back to the cart, and I’ll call round at
headquarters again. We got to get that lead and start for Winter Hill.”
The town had quieted down now, and most of the men remaining there had
gone to the houses where they were quartered, or to their tents in the
fields beyond. Nobody would do much sleeping, Tom thought. Tense and
nervous they all felt, trying to tell themselves they were too much
men to be afraid--just like any flesh and blood thing when there was
thunder in the air.
Two lanterns were burning on poles set up in the yard of the Hastings
house, but the back door was locked when Tom rapped on it. So was the
front door, when he tried to enter there. Through the window he could
see candles burning in prismed holders, and a group of men sitting
around a mahogany table, some in uniforms, others in buff and gray
and bottle green coats. One of the officers stood up to speak. He was
heavily built, with pointed features and bright eyes, but his face had
an unhealthy look. Must be Ward himself, thought Tom. All the Army knew
their leader was a sick man.
“When the Committee of Safety advised me this afternoon,” he began,
“that it was deemed best for us to fortify Bunker Hill--”
Just then a sentry tapped Tom on the shoulder with a gun barrel. “What
are ye lurking about for?” he growled in a rough voice.
Tom turned around sharply. The sentry was an oldish man, unshaven, with
shaggy hair and beard.
“I got business here,” he said. “I come to get Colonel Stark’s lead,
and by the great Jehovah, I mean to do the same.”
The sentry spat. “Maybe ye’re honest,” he said. “Ye look to be. But
General Ward’s a-talking to some important men from the Congress o’
Massachusetts right now. Couldn’t let ye in there if ye was King George
himself, with the Queen tagging along.”
“I’ll wait here till they’re through then,” insisted Tom. “I’ll wait
right here.”
The sentry shrugged. “Guess there’s no harm in that,” he muttered, and
ambled off.
Tom sat down on the grass with his back against a poplar tree and
looked up at the stars. They were just as bright as they had been when
he crossed Breed’s Hill a few nights ago. He wondered if tomorrow
he’d be going back there, lugging Kitty’s old blunderbuss with him.
Suddenly he realized that he was sleepy. The tension had eased out
of him, even though there was still thunder in the air, the thunder
of war about to break. A man could only keep himself keyed up for so
long. But it wouldn’t do--now--to go--to sleep. He ought to get up and
walk--get--up--and--walk--
He opened his eyes and shook himself. How did it get to be like
that--early morning, the light as broad as day? The sky was red and
golden over eastward where the sea must lie. The grass around him was
wet with dew. Smoke was curling upward from the chimneys round about,
and in somebody’s barnyard he could hear a rooster crow. Lord forgive
him, he’d slept all night. They’d drum him out of camp or at least give
him forty lashes, and he deserved it, too.
He stood up just as a horse and rider came spurring to the gate. The
rider dismounted hastily and approached the front door. He was a
trim, neat man with fair hair, but he looked feverish and ill. Almost
immediately a pint-sized man came out to let him in. The two shook
hands.
“Ah, Elbridge, Elbridge Gerry, my good friend,” murmured the newcomer.
“It is folly to try to seize and hold Charlestown. Yet, I must go.”
“Ah no, Dr. Warren,” pleaded the smaller man. “You are too well known.
You stayed in Boston too long, and the British know too well what a
great pillar of strength you have been to our colonial cause. As surely
as you go up Bunker Hill, you will be slain.”
“I know,” answered the doctor tensely. “I told the friends with whom
I dined last night that I would go up the Hill today and never come
off again. I slept wretchedly, and my head aches, but after an hour or
two--”
“Sirs,” interrupted Tom politely, “I am sorry to bother you when you’re
about such weighty business, but I been here since six o’clock last
night, trying to get some lead for Colonel Stark.”
Elbridge Gerry gave a snort of impatience, but Dr. Warren turned and
smiled at the boy.
“I am sorry you had the long delay, lad. I myself saw that the lead was
dispatched to Stark late yesterday afternoon. He’ll know what to do
with it, if anybody does. His men will have melted it into bullets by
now, and may be shooting it at the British, for all I know.”
He turned again to Mr. Gerry. “Ah, sir, ‘_Dulce decorum_,’ as all men
know or must learn. Let us go inside, and send someone to lead my horse
away, for he is as spent as I.”
Tom walked thoughtfully back to where his comrades would still be
asleep in the empty cart. ‘_Dulce decorum_’! He knew what the Latin
meant, for President Langdon had translated it yesterday afternoon.
“It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” But was it, he
wondered. The sun felt gloriously warm on his back, and made his blood
tingle. The birds were singing in the elm trees round the Common. Kitty
was a pretty girl, and there were other pretty girls. Sweet to die?
That sounded like a thing old men would think of, tired old men who
never had to go out and fight, who would die in bed at ninety-three or
so. Still, if you had to do it, you had to do it, and he guessed he was
as ready as he’d ever be.
Over towards Charlestown he heard the boom of a heavy gun.
_Chapter Thirteen_
THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN
Gerry Malory was back in Devonshire at daybreak on that hot June
morning, only it did not seem to him to be morning, or any special time
of day. He stood in a low valley opening toward the sea, and there were
little farms all around him with hedgerows in between them, and here
and there a church spire reaching toward the sky. He was not alone,
for a man stood beside him, a man he had never seen before, about his
father’s age, dressed in quaint old-fashioned clothes, and carrying an
ancient gun. The gun looked like the one that belonged to the Yankee
that had taken him prisoner in the tavern by Ipswich Green. The man was
shaking his head and scowling. He seemed to be angry about something.
Gerry was ready to protest that he hadn’t done anything wrong, when
suddenly he thought that maybe he had. Maybe he’d been poaching again.
Just then the man spoke. “It’s the coming country, lad,” he said.
“Don’t make the mistake I did in my time.”
“What mistake?” Gerry murmured, but he thought he knew. His words were
drowned out by the deep boom of thunder. Again and again the thunder
sounded, and the echoes rolled over valley and hill and sea.
His body shook like an aspen in a storm wind; his eyelids snapped wide
apart. He was in the warehouse behind the stables near Long Wharf in
Boston, Massachusetts, and Sergeant Higgs had him by the shoulder. The
thunder still boomed in his ears, but the Devon landscape had gone back
into his memory, where it probably came from. He was lying on his own
blanket on a heap of straw, with the regiment’s goat tethered nearby.
“Wake up, lad! Don’t you hear the guns?” Higgs was saying.
Gerry pulled himself erect. He found it hard to come out of the dream
that had seemed so real to him.
“Yes, I hear them,” he said. “Whose guns are they?”
“Whose would they be?” scoffed the sergeant. “Do you think the Yankees
have guns like that?”
“No--no.” He was wide awake now, wider awake than he wanted to be,
he thought, for the cannonading sounded ominous and near. “What’s
happening, Jack? Are we marching against them? Have we attacked--or
they?”
“Can’t tell yet,” said Sergeant Higgs. “All we know is, we hear
gunfire. Lieutenant Apthorp has gone to headquarters to find out. You
better get some breakfast. It’s best we be ready for anything.”
In the cobbled square outside, the men of the Twenty-third had built
their usual cookfire, just as they did every morning, and gathered
round it, salt pork spitted on bayonets and stale bread handed round by
the mess sergeant. Lieutenant Apthorp did not come back, and Lieutenant
Julian went to see what was keeping him. The cannonading went on. It
was coming from the ships in the river beyond the North End, most of
the men agreed. Maybe the Yankees had got together some sort of raft
and were moving by water against Boston. The Twenty-third seemed more
amused than frightened at this suggestion.
And then, without any official announcement being made, the word was
passed from mouth to mouth, and everybody knew.
The Yankees had taken the hills above Charlestown in the night, and
built some sort of entrenchment there. They were being fired at from
three sides by the British men-o’-war, but it began to seem as if this
would not be enough to dislodge them, as if a force would have to go
out and drive them from the hill.