it on the Hill.”
“Come in,” said Kitty. She took the two pails through the kitchen to
the garden well. When she returned with them, there were half a dozen
other men waiting, and they wanted water, too.
The guns began again with a new fury. Gran and Sally Rose had stepped
into the garden, and when Kitty returned there after the men had gone,
she found them staring up the hill.
A small, square earthworks stood on the green crest that had been bare
at twilight. Small figures of men were working all around it, digging
up turf, building it higher, stringing a wooden fence in front. Other
men passed to and fro over Bunker Hill and the highroad that led to
the Neck. Every now and then a column of dust shot skyward as a cannon
ball plowed into the earth. But the men who were busy about the
earthworks paid no attention to the cannon balls.
Now and then there would be a moment’s pause in the firing, and that
gave Gran and the girls a chance to speak to one another.
“What’s going on up there, and where are the British?” demanded Gran.
“Did those water boys bring you any news, Kitty?”
“It’s just as you thought,” said Kitty hurriedly, knowing that the guns
might interrupt her at any moment. “The ships are firing at us from all
three sides. The lookouts say there’s a commotion in Boston, but it’s
too early to tell yet what they mean to do. They say there are about
a hundred people left here in the town, but there’s such heavy firing
across the Neck they doubt that we can get away.”
Just then there came a hail from the kitchen doorway, where a man stood
with two empty water buckets. Gran went to talk with him herself, this
time. When he had gone, she spoke her mind to the girls.
“Nobody up there’s got time to be hungry, it seems, and they’ve plenty
of strong drink amongst them, but two of their great hogsheads have
been shot open, and the need’s for water. Sally Rose, you stay by the
windlass and keep turning. Kitty, you carry the pails to the taproom to
save the men the journey out here. Fill every tub and bucket and keep
them full. I’m going to the roof to see for myself whatever there is to
be seen.”
It seemed to the two girls that the morning would last forever, as the
sun toiled upward toward noon. Sally Rose ground at the windlass and
swung the heavy buckets over the stone curb where Kitty’s hand received
them and carried them inside. Round and round, back and forth, round
and round, less like women of flesh and blood than like two parts of
some wooden machine. They did not talk much together. They had not the
breath for it, nor very much to say. Now and then Kitty looked up the
hill to the earthworks, the tiny, gallant redoubt. The men were still
toiling to reinforce it, and a man in a blue coat strolled fearlessly
along the parapet as if he were telling them what to do.
It was about noon by the kitchen clock when Gran came down stairs. Her
face was grim. “Girls,” she said tensely, “leave your work and come
with me. I want you to see a shameful sight. I want you to see the
King’s soldiers coming out with guns against the King’s loyal people.”
The Bay and Beagle was a square-built house of red brick, three stories
tall, with a white railing about its flat roof. Gran led the girls to
the side facing Boston, half a mile away. Kitty gripped the rail with
both hands, though she would have liked to put them in her ears, the
cannonading had become so much louder, the spaces between the blasts
so brief and few. Sunlight sparkled on the blue river and on the three
great ships pouring forth constant broadsides of fire. Flames leaped
forth from Copp’s Hill, from floating batteries in the ferry way, and
over all hung a mist of grayish white smoke.
“Look there,” hissed Gran during a quiet interval, quiet except for
the jangling bells of Boston that were doing their best to make their
steeples rock.
Kitty and Sally Rose let their glances follow her pointing finger,
to the docks that lined the opposite shore. Two lines of barges were
moving out on the full tide, one from Long Wharf, and one from the
North Battery. They rode low in the water, being full to the gunwhales
with soldiers clad in white and vivid scarlet. The sunlight gleamed on
the steel of bayonets, on the brass mountings of the great black guns.
It was a gorgeous and yet a terrible sight.
All Boston seemed to go mad with the frantic clamor of bells. Shouts
and cheers rose from its crooked streets that wandered up hill and
down, and somewhere a band was playing. Its rooftops were black with
tiny figures who had climbed there to watch the King’s troops move
against the King’s people who felt they had always been loyal to
him--so far.
When the two rows of barges reached midstream they drew near to each
other and then moved forward in two long lines, side by side, like
pairs of marching men. They seemed to be headed for Moulton’s Point.
Kitty watched them till they passed out of sight around a curve of the
shore. Then she turned to face Gran and Sally Rose.
“Do--do you think they’re going to land?” she asked.
“Sakes alive, child,” answered Gran, “I don’t know what they mean to
do, but we’ll go back downstairs and see if we can find out. There are
sure to be more men coming after water.” She glanced up the hill toward
the redoubt. Only a few figures moved about it now, but clouds of dust
rose everywhere, thrown up by the impact of cannon balls, and the smoke
from the guns themselves drifted that way. At that moment a handful of
men appeared on the top of Bunker Hill, coming from the direction of
the Neck. More men followed them, and still more. In orderly fashion
they marched toward the redoubt where they were greeted with a faint
cheering.
“Looks like more of our lads had come to help,” said Gran, as she led
them down the narrow stairs and into the taproom. Just as she had
suspected, three water carriers waited there, and all the pails and
tubs were empty.
“Gran,” whispered Sally Rose, “I--I just don’t think I can turn that
windlass any more.”
Gran looked at her keenly. “It makes the arms ache, I know,” she said
with surprising sympathy. “Kitty, you go to the well for a while, and
let Sally Rose carry the buckets.”
And thus their morning chores began all over again, though it was
already early afternoon.
At the end of her third trip between well and taproom, Sally Rose
stopped to talk to Kitty in one of the rare intervals when no gun was
going off.
“Kit,” she said wanly, “I--I’m frightened, Kit. Do you think Gerry’s
coming in one of those barges? Do you think he’ll have to shoot at our
lads on the Hill? Do you think he might shoot at me?”
Kitty had been wondering almost the same thing, but she would not tell
her cousin so.
“If you’re going to think about a lad at a time like this,” she said,
“why don’t you think of Johnny? You’ve gone about with Johnny for a
long time, Sally Rose, and Johnny’s on our side. Don’t you wonder if
maybe he isn’t up there--in that earthworks on the Hill? Right there in
the thick of the cannon balls?”
“Well, I do wonder about Johnny,” she answered plaintively, “and about
Dick, even about that New Hampshire boy with no manners--Tom what’s his
name.”
Kitty, too, had wondered about Tom, but not too much. There was a cold
certainty in her heart that Tom Trask would be in the thick of whatever
fighting there was to come. She knew that as well as if she could see
him there.
“Girls!” called Gran’s voice from the kitchen door. “Girls! come here
to me!”
Kitty let go the windlass suddenly, and the handle spun creaking round.
Sally Rose set down her pail.
Just then there was a loud whine somewhere overhead, and then a whoosh,
a shower of splinters about them, and a roaring wind that flung them
hard against the turf. For a moment they lay there, not daring to move.
The smell of burning powder filled the air. Then another roaring wind
went by, but not so close, and higher overhead.
Kitty sat up. A cannon ball was bouncing across the grassy yard of the
house next door. It had passed through the garden and shattered the
pointed roof of the well-house where they stood. She reached out and
grasped Sally Rose by the shoulder.
“Quick,” she gasped. “Let’s get inside. They’re firing into the town,
not just at the earthworks any more.”
Racing into the taproom, they found Gran in talk with a tall man who
wore an officer’s coat and three-cornered hat and did not carry a pail.
“Girls,” said Gran, her voice frighteningly calm, “the British have
landed, and ’tis plain they mean to charge the Hill. Whether they can
take it or not, we don’t know. But they’re shooting straight into
Charlestown now, iron balls and iron cases full of burning trash. The
town’ll soon be in flames over our heads. ’Tis time to leave. There’s
nothing more we can do.”
A moment later they were in the street outside, trailing along after
a sorry-looking group of men and women, poor folk, mostly, who had
stayed in town in spite of all the warnings of danger, because they had
nowhere else to go.
“I’m glad,” murmured Gran as they plodded over the cobblestones, their
eyelids smarting and their throats choked with the thick smokiness that
seemed to be flooding over the whole world, “I’m glad we sent Timothy
to Cambridge, two days back--Timothy and that poor horse, too. At
least, we’re leaving no living thing behind to burn.”
Kitty thought of all the living things who were left to their fate in
that tiny fortress on the Hill.
Iron shot blasted the roofs about them, and balls of living flame burst
in the street. All along their way the old wooden houses were beginning
to catch fire. Just as they passed out of town and into the green
country at the rear of Bunker Hill, Kitty looked back. Clouds of black
smoke billowed upward from the docks, the warehouses, the dwellings,
the shops in the market square. The church steeple lifted up one
soaring pyramid of fire.
Her eyes hurt suddenly with tears that did not come from the smoke.
“Come away, child,” said Gran, putting her arm about the girl’s
shoulders, using her other hand to guide the half-blinded Sally Rose.
How far they had gone before the little procession came to a halt, she
did not know, but she did know they toiled a long way down the dusty
road, constantly shelled by the heavy guns of the ships.
When they did stop, it was in the front dooryard of a little tavern,
The Sign of the Sun. The raggle-taggle company scattered themselves
about on the grass, but Gran led the girls inside.
“They say the firing’s too heavy for us to cross the Neck and flee
inland,” she explained, “but ’tis to this place they are bringing the
wounded men. Perhaps we can help here.”
The taproom they entered was not unlike the taproom at the Bay and
Beagle, but tables and benches had been moved back to clear the floor.
Some dozen men in tattered shirts and bloody breeches were lying on the
wide pine boards. Some moaned, and some lay very still. Three women
worked among them, and a man in a buff coat, a doctor, most like, knelt
by one soldier probing a wounded knee.
Gran looked around her. “There’s water and bandages on the counter over
there,” she said. “Get to work, Kitty, Sally Rose.”
If the morning had seemed long, it seemed that that afternoon at the
Sign of the Sun would never go. Kitty knelt and swabbed and tied
bandages and held whiskey to men’s lips to ease their pain when Dr.
Eustis’ probe went deep. Sally Rose and Gran were doing the same thing,
too.
Then the men came in so fast there was no room for them in the tavern,
so they were laid in the yard, and all about the garden reaching up
the hill. The air was full of booming sound and smoke, and over all
burned the hot, hot sun.
The British had charged the Hill and been driven back, she heard from
the men she tended. The British had gathered themselves together and
were about to charge again.
She and Gran and Sally Rose were working over two men with shoulder
wounds, trying to staunch the flow of blood, when Gran suddenly stood
up and put her hand to her forehead. A strange look came across her
face. Then she smiled, and the light in her eyes paled out and dimmed
away.
“The young may die,” she murmured, “but the old must.”
She tottered and fell beside the soldiers on the bloody grass.
“Dead. Stone dead,” muttered Dr. Eustis, kneeling above her a few
moments later. “Her heart failed from the shock and strain of this day,
I do believe. But she died with her hand to the plow. She died like a
good soldier.”
Sally Rose crouched on the steps of the tavern, put her head in her
lap, and burst into uncontrollable weeping. She never moved from there
the rest of the afternoon. After Gran’s body was carried to a chamber
over the taproom, Kitty looked desolately about her for a few moments.
Then she went back to tending the wounded men. She would do what it was
needful for her to do.
Word came down the hill that the British were driving on the redoubt,
that powder horns were getting low.
Sometime after that--she never knew how long--Kitty knelt beside the
newest soldier to arrive. His head was bloody, and he wore a rough
shirt and breeches like all the rest, but on his feet were the fine
polished boots worn by the men in the British Army. When she washed the
blood away, she found she was bending over Gerry Malory.
_Chapter Fifteen_
A TERRIBLE BLACK DAY
“We be going down this hill now,” said Colonel John Stark, “to fortify
and hold the rail fence there.”
He stood out boldly on the bold bare top of Bunker Hill, his new blue
and buff coat unfastened at the neck, his musket held lightly but
warily in his hand. His New Hampshire troops were drawn up before him,
farmers and woodsmen for the most part, and dressed as befitted their
callings. They wore homespun shirts and breeches dyed in the sober
colors of late autumn, after the red and gold are gone. They carried a
variety of weapons: here a fowling piece made by a village blacksmith;
there an ancient queen’s arm left over from the Siege of Louisburg
thirty years ago; there a blunderbuss older than Plymouth Colony.
Tom Trask, who carried the blunderbuss, looked past his colonel at
the whole of Charlestown peninsula spread out before him in the early
afternoon sun. Below, on Breed’s Hill, that Prescott’s engineers had
made the surprise decision to fortify, stood the redoubt. He could look
down into it, just as if he were standing in the top of a tree. The
men had built wooden platforms to fire from, and they were massed and
waiting behind their guns. Farther down, on the point of land between
the sparkling blue rivers, the scarlet pride of the British Army
sprawled on the grass eating its dinner.
Stark went on, his voice low but piercing, a tenseness in it that made
a man’s blood run hot with courage, rather than cold with fear. He
gestured toward the shores of the Mystic, the side of the field away
from Boston.
“To the left of the redoubt, lads, you can see a rail fence, and
Knowlton’s men have banked it with cut hay. But past the rail fence
there’s an open stretch along the river, wide enough to drive a team of
horses through. We’ll go down there now and build a stone wall across
it. Isn’t a man among you don’t know how to build a stone wall.”
He paused and looked proudly around him. “And when it’s built, we’ll
take our stand there, there and along the fence, and fight. If there’s
a man among you don’t know how to do that, he can go home.”
The road back to the safety of Medford lay broad and smooth behind
them, but nobody turned toward that road. They started to cheer, but
the colonel held up his hand.
“Wait till you got something to cheer for, boys,” he said. “But
remember this--all! Don’t shoot till they be within fifty yards. Pick
out the officers. Fire low, and aim at the crossing of their belts. Hit
for the handsome coats and the commanders.”
He lifted his head and stepped back. Tom stood close enough to see his
burning eyes and the unflinching line of his mouth. “I don’t know how
the rest o’ you feel,” Stark went on, “but for myself, I’ll fight to
the last drop o’ blood in me. By the great Jehovah, I mean to live free
or die!”
“Fall in!” he shouted. He held up his arm and made a swooping motion
toward the rail fence. The New Hampshire regiments followed him down
the hill.
Once on the narrow strip of muddy beach beyond the fence, they worked
desperately to rear a wall across it before the British should come
on. Some fetched stones from other walls that divided the pastures on
the hillside. Others toiled to heap them in a bulwark straight to the
water’s edge. Tom was with those who carried boulders flung from the
bank and piled them ready to the builder’s hand. Once he climbed up the
ledge himself to take a look at the field above.
“Hey, Caleb,” he called eagerly, as he noticed a young man standing
where the rail fence ended, a musket in his hand.
Colonel Stark’s first-born son, sixteen-year-old Caleb, turned around
and a grin broke over his lean face as he recognized his old hunting
companion. He stepped forward.
“Tom!” he exclaimed. “Haven’t seen you since you left for Newburyport
with the log raft, back sometime in the spring.”
“No, I ain’t had a chance to get home. Ever since Concord Fight I been
in camp. Where you been?”
“Round home mostly. Just got here this morning. Word’s gone all around
the countryside that the British be about to attack. Figured my dad
could use another man. Say, Tom, Jean’s been asking about you--”
Fife and drum music burst forth from the red-coated ranks below the
hill, and the bugles uttered an urgent cry.
“Here they come!” yelled Tom. He leaped down the bank and ran to where
he had left his blunderbuss, in the center of the stone wall.
Crouched behind it, he watched the British come on. He could not see
the field above him that sloped upward to the redoubt, and ’twas likely
the heaviest charge would be there. But there were plenty of red coats
and white breeches moving toward the New Hampshire line. Once the
attackers stopped and reformed in groups of four. Then on they came.
Just to his right a musket spoke, though they had received no order
to fire. Tom lifted his own blunderbuss, but before he could pull the
trigger Colonel Stark strode fearlessly between the opposing armies. He
had a tree branch in his hand. With a sharp stab he thrust it into the
earth.
“Don’t another man fire till they pass this stake. Whoever does, I’ll
knock him down,” he said.
He looked around him to make sure his words were understood. Then he
walked back to his own line as calmly as if he were going down to his
sawmill on any summer afternoon. Behind him the advancing British fixed
their bayonets. He leaped down into the shelter of the wall.
When the word came, Tom was ready, and his blunderbuss spoke punctually
as the British passed the stake. He could not tell how many times he
fired, and he did not stop to see what damage he had done. Aim, fire,
load. Aim, fire, load. He kept relentlessly on, scarce conscious that
all around him other men were doing the same. He knew that the ground
in front of the stone wall was covered with wounded and dying redcoats,
but their line kept still coming on, and so long as it did, he would do
nothing but fire, load, aim.
As he had been told, he aimed at the handsome coats and the commanders.
Once when he lifted his eyes to choose the next target, he saw,
to his utter amazement, a man he knew. Captain Gerald Malory was
advancing toward him, bayonet in hand. As he looked, his amazement
turned to contempt. “Polecat!” he muttered. “Said he was captain.
Done it to dazzle the girls, I’ll warrant.” Gerald Malory wore a
private’s uniform. Turning away deliberately, Tom leveled his gun on a
resplendent major. When he looked back again, his one-time prisoner was
gone.
The British line wavered and fell back. He could hear the shouts of the
officers trying to rally their men. They lifted their guns and fired a
volley, and Tom heard the shots whistle high above.
“Gunning for hen hawks, maybe,” he told himself with a grin. “Won’t hit
nothing else that high in air.”
Now the red-coated line was drawing back, retreating down the beach
toward the point from whence they had come. Now there were no redcoats
within firing range any more.
“Whew!” said Tom. He put down the blunderbuss and mopped his forehead.
Now he took time to look around him.
All along the New Hampshire line men were standing up to stretch,
drinking water out of leather bottles, and beginning to move about and
talk together. He did not know the grizzled oldsters on either side of
him, but he soon learned they were veterans of the Indian War, and no
strangers to powder and shot.
“Think they’ll be back?” he asked, waving his thumb in the direction of
the retreating British.
His companions nodded. They were starting already to reload.
Down at the open end beside the water lay a confused heap of wounded.
Those who could still stand up and walk were helping to carry their
less fortunate fellows away. The word went round that a hospital had
been set up at The Sign of the Sun, a tavern on the back side of Bunker
Hill.
There came a hail from the bank above. Tom turned that way and
recognized the shaggy gray head and sturdy figure of Old Put. The
general was mounted on a horse, and had several other blue-coated
officers with him. Colonel Stark and three of his captains strode over
to the bank, and the two commanders talked for a long time. Then Stark
walked resolutely back to the stone wall, with his head lifted, his
gaze fixed straight before him. Old Put’s party rode off toward the
redoubt.
A bugle sounded far down on Morton’s Point. Once again the British
must be coming on. Tom crouched and leveled the blunderbuss. Just then
the man on his left leaned over and spoke.
“Word’s gone down the line,” he muttered through a thick wad of
tobacco, “that Johnny Stark’s lost his boy.”
“Caleb? How?” gasped Tom.
“Stopped a British ball somewheres up by the fence, they say.” The man
spat brown juice on the trampled mud. “Don’t like the look o’ things,
lad. My powder horn’s getting low.”
“So’s mine,” said Tom numbly. He looked between the stones at the
oncoming scarlet line. He knew the depth of quiet love that lay between
that father and son. “When they told Stark--what did he say?”
“Said he had no time now to talk o’ private affairs,” answered the
veteran. “Look there, in the front ranks of ’em! That’s General Howe. I
fought under him at Quebec in ’59. I’d know him anywhere.”
Tom looked where the other pointed, but he did not see the proud
pompous figure of the British general leading on his men. He saw
instead a New Hampshire mountainside in the fall, young Caleb Stark
walking under the golden beech leaves, with his head up, laughing
in the crisp air. He saw Caleb skating on Dorr’s Pond in the winter
moonlight; pitching hay on a summer afternoon. And now at the rail
fence Caleb lay dead. By Jehovah, he’d fix the British for doing that
to his friend.
“Here they come, lad,” warned the man at his side.
“I’m ready,” said Tom. He gripped the blunderbuss, and all his rage and
vengeance sounded in the roar of it as it spoke.
The British were not so easily beaten back this time. Stepping over
their fallen comrades they marched up to the wall, staggered back at
the withering blast of fire, and came on again. But at last their
officers could no longer urge them forward. Once more Tom found
himself staring at the redcoats fleeing away.
It was a long time before they formed again, and the whole American
line was jubilant. It began to seem as if a handful of farmers with
nothing but courage and gunpowder had turned back the British Army. Tom
climbed up the bank in the interval and took a look at the redoubt.
It was untaken, and there were still, red-clad forms lying all over
the slope before it, and the gleaming brass of abandoned artillery. In
front of his own line the dead lay as thick as sheep in a fold.
“We ought to send for more powder,” he muttered, as he went back to his
place and loaded the blunderbuss. “More men, maybe.”
“Prescott already sent for more men,” growled his neighbor. “Been
sending for ’em all day. Ward keeps ’em all close to Cambridge because
he thinks they’re in danger there. As for powder, there was only ’leven
barrels in the whole camp this morning. Bet there’s powerful little of
it left by now.”
“I got three more loadings,” said Tom. “I’ll give ’em that. Then I’ll
have to bash their skulls if I bring ’em down.”
“Bash their skulls then,” said the older man. “That’s as good a way as
any for the varmints to go.”