CHAPTER XXVIII
Silver Heels stood in the tap-room of "Buckman's Tavern" casting bullets; the barefoot drummer watched the white-hot crucible and baled out the glittering molten metal or fed it with lumps of lead stripped from the gate-post of Hooper's house in Danvers.
Near the window sat some Woburn Minute Men, cross-legged on the worn floor, rolling cartridges. From time to time the parson of Woburn, who had come to pray and shoot, took away the pile of empty powder-horns and brought back others to be emptied.
The tavern was dim and damp; through freshly bored loopholes in the shutters sunlight fell, illuminating the dark interior.
In their shirts, barearmed and bare of throat to the breast-bone, a score of Lexington Minute Men stood along the line of loopholes, their long rifles thrust out. They had no bayonets, but each man had driven his hunting-knife into the wall beside him.
Jack Mount and the Weasel lay, curled up like giant cats, at the door, blinking peacefully out through the cracks into the early sunshine. I could hear their low-voiced conversation from where I stood at my post, close to Silver Heels:
"Redcoats, Cade, not redskins," corrected Mount. "British lobster-backs—eh, Cade? You remember how we drubbed them there in Pittsburg, belt and buckle and ramrod—eh, Cade?"
"That was long ago, friend."
"Call me Jack! Why don't you call me Jack any more?" urged Mount. "You know me now, don't you, Cade?"
"Ay, but I forget much. Do you know how I came here?"
"From Johnstown, Cade—from Johnstown, lad!"
"I cannot remember Johnstown."
Presently the Weasel peered around at Silver Heels.
"Who is that young lady?" he asked, mildly.
Silver Heels heard and smiled at the old man. The faintest quiver curved her mouth; there was a shadow of pain in her eyes.
The fire from the crucible tinted her cheeks; she raised both bared arms to push back her clustering hair. Hazel gray, her brave eyes met mine across the witch-vapour curling from the melting-pot.
"Do you recall how the ferret, Vix, did bite Peter's tight breeches, Michael?"
"Ay," said I, striving to smile.
"And—and the jack-knife made by Barlow?"
"Ay."
She flushed to the temples and looked at my left hand. The scar was there. I raised my hand and kissed the blessed mark.
"Dear, dear Michael," she whispered, "truly you were ever the dearest and noblest and best of all!"
"Unfit to kiss thy shoon's latchet, sweet—"
"Yet hast untied the latchets of my heart."
A stillness fell on the old tavern; the Minute Men stood silently at the loopholes, the barefoot drummer sat on his drum, hands folded, watching with solemn, childish eyes the nuggets of lead sink, bubble, and melt.
A militiaman came down-stairs for a bag of bullets.
"They be piping hot yet," said the drummer-boy, "and not close pared."
But the soldier carelessly gathered heaping handfuls in his calloused palms, and went up the bare, creaking stairs again to his post among the pigeons.
The heat of the brazier had started the perspiration on Silver Heels's face and neck; tiny drops glistened like fresh dew on a blossom. She stood, dreamily brushing with the back of her hand the soft hair from her brow. Her dark-fringed eyes on me; under her loosened kerchief I saw the calm breathing stir her neck and bosom gently as a white flower stirs at a breath of June.
"The scent of the sweet-fern," she murmured; "do you savour it from the pastures?"
I looked at her in pity.
"Ay, dear heart," she whispered, with a sad little smile, "I am homesick to the bones of me, sick for the blue hills o' Tryon and the whistling martin-birds, sick for the scented brake and the smell of sweet water babbling, sick for your arm around me, and your man's strength to crush me to you and take the kiss my very soul does ache to give."
A voice broke in from the pigeon-loft above, "Is there a woman below to sew bandages?"
"Truly there is, sir," called back Silver Heels.
"I'll take the mould," said the small drummer, "but you are to come when the fight begins, for I mean to do a deal o' drumming!"
She started towards the stairway, then turned to look at me.
"My post is wherever you are," I said, stepping to her side.
I took her little hand, all warm and moist from the bullet-moulding, and I kissed the palm and the delicate, rounded wrist.
"There is a long war before us ere we find a home," I said.
"I know," she said, faintly.
"A long, long war; separation, sadness. Will you wed me before I go to join with Cresap's men?"
"Ay," she said.
"There is a parson below, Silver Heels."
Her face went scarlet.
"Let it be now," I whispered, with my arm around her.
She looked up into my eyes. I leaned over the landing-rail and called out, "Send a man for the parson of Woburn!"
An Acton man stepped out on the tavern porch and shouted for the parson. Presently the good man came, in rusty black, shouldering a fowling-piece, his pockets bulging with a Bible and Book of Common Prayer, his wig all caked and wet from a tour through the dewy willows behind the inn.
"Is there sickness here—or wounds?" he asked, anxiously. Then he saw me above and came wheezing up the stairs.
"Heart-sickness, sir," I said; "we be dying, both of us, for the heart's ease you may bring us through your holy office."
At length he understood—Silver Heels striving to keep her sweet eyes lifted when he spoke to her, and I quiet and determined, asking that he lose no time, for no man knew how long we few here in the tavern had to live. In the same breath I summoned a soldier from the south loophole in the garret, and asked him to witness for me; and he took off his hat and stood sheepishly twirling it, rifle in hand.
And so we were wedded, there in the ancient garret, the pigeons coo-cooing overhead, the blue wasps buzzing up and down the window-glass, and our hands joined before the aged parson of Woburn town. I had the plain gold ring which I had bought in Albany for this purpose, nor dreamed to wed my sweetheart with it thus!—and O the sweetness in her lips and eyes when I drew it from the cord around my neck and placed it on her smooth finger at the word!
Little else I remember, save that the old parson kissed her, and the soldier kissed her outstretched hand, and let his gun fall for bashful fright. Nor that we were truly wedded did I understand, even when the parson of Woburn went away down the creaking stairs with his fowling-piece over his shoulder, leaving us standing mute together under the canopy of swinging herbs. We still held hands, standing quiet, in a vague expectation of some mystery yet to come. Children that we were!—the mystery of mysteries had been wrought, never to be undone till time should end.
A pigeon flew, whimpering, to the beam above us, then strutted and bowed and coo-cooed to its startled, sleek, white sweetheart; a wind blew through the rafters, stirring the dry bunches of catnip, mint, and thyme, till they swung above, scented censers all, exhaling incense.
There was a pile of cotton cloth on the floor; Silver Heels sank down beside it and began to tear it into strips for sewing bandages.
I looked from the window, seeing nothing.
Presently the Minute Man at the south loop spoke:
"A man riding this way—there!—on the Concord Road!"
Silver Heels on the floor worked steadily, ripping the snowy cotton.
"There is smoke yonder on the Concord Road," said the Minute Man.
"AND SO WE WERE WEDDED"
"Do you hear firing," he asked, "far away in the west?"
"Yes."
"Concord lies northwest."
Silver Heels, absorbed in her task, hummed a little tune under her breath.
"The smoke follows the road," said the Minute Man.
The firing became audible in the room. Silver Heels raised her head with a grave glance at me. I went and knelt beside her.
"It is coming at last, little sweetheart," I said. "Will you go, now? Foxcroft will take you across the fields to some safe farm."
"You know Sir William would not have endured to see me leave at such a time," she said.
"Yes, dear heart, but you cannot carry a rifle."
"But I can make bullets and bandages."
"The British fire at women; you must go!" I said, aloud.
"I will not go."
"I command."
"No." She bent her fair, childish head and the tears fell on the cloth in her lap.
"Look! Look at the redcoats!" called out the Minute Man at the attic window.
As I rose I heard plainly the long, resounding crash of musket firing, and the rattle of rifles followed like a hundred echoes.
"Look yonder!" he cried.
Suddenly the Concord Road was choked with scarlet-clad soldiers. Mapped out below us the country stretched, and over it, like a blood-red monster worm, wound the British column—nay, like to a dragon it came on, with flanking lines thrust out east and west for its thin red wings, and head and tail wreathed with smoke.
And now we could see feathery puffs of smoke from the road-side bushes, from distant hills, from thickets, from ploughed fields, from the long, undulating stone walls which crossed the plain. Faster and faster came the musket volleys, but faster yet rang out the shots from our yeomanry, gathering thicker and thicker along the British route, swarming in from distant towns and hamlets and lonely farms.
The old tavern was ringing with voices now—commands of officers, calls from those who were posted above, clattering steps on the porch as the Acton men ran out to their posts behind the tufted willows in the swamp.
He who had been placed in charge at the tavern, a young officer of the Woburn Alarm Men, shouted for silence and attention, and ordered us not to fire unless fired upon, as our position would be hopeless if cannon were brought against us. Then he commanded all women to leave the tavern and seek shelter at Slocum's farm across the meadows.
"No, no!" murmured Silver Heels, obstinately, as I took her hand and started for the stairs, "I will not go,—I cannot—I cannot! Let me stay, Michael; for God's sake, let me stay!" And she fell on her knees and caught at my hands.
"To your posts!" roared the Woburn officer, drawing his sword and coming up the stairs two at a jump. He stopped short when he saw Silver Heels, and glanced blankly at me; but there was no time now for flight, for, as he stepped to the window beside me, pell-mell into the village green rushed the British light infantry, dusty, exhausted, enraged. In brutal disorder they surged on, here a squad huddled together, there a company, bullied, threatened, and harangued by its officers with pistols and drawn swords; now a group staggering past, bearing dead or wounded comrades, now a heavy cart loaded with knapsacks and muskets, driven by hatless soldiers.
Close on their heels tramped the grenadiers. Soldier after soldier staggered and fell from the ranks, utterly exhausted, unable to rise from the grass.
The lull in the firing was broken by a loud discharge of musketry from Fiske's Hill, and presently more redcoats came rushing into the village, while at their very heels the Bedford Alarm Men shot at them, and chased them. Everywhere our militia came swarming—from Sudbury, Westford, Lincoln, Acton; Minute Men from Medford, from Stowe, from Beverly, and from Lynn—and their ancient firelocks blazed from every stone wall, and their long rifles banged from the distant ridges.
Below me in the street I saw the British officers striving desperately to reform their men, kicking the exhausted creatures to their feet again, striking laggards, shoving the bewildered and tired grenadiers into line, while thicker and thicker pelted the bullets from the Minute Men and militia.
They were brave men, these British officers; I saw a young ensign of the Tenth Foot fall with a ball through his stomach, yet rise and face the storm until shot to death by a dozen Alarm Men on the Bedford Road.
It was dreadful; it was doubly dreadful when a company of grenadiers suddenly faced about and poured a volley into our tavern, for, ere the crashing and splintered wood had ceased, the tavern fairly vomited flame into the square, and the British went down in heaps. Through the smoke I saw an officer struggling to disengage himself from his fallen and dying horse; I saw the massed infantry reel off through the village, firing frenziedly right and left, pouring volleys into farm-houses, where women ran screaming out into the barns, and frantic watch-dogs barked, tugging at their chains.
It was not a retreat, not a flight; it was a riot, a horrible saturnalia of smoke and fire and awful sound. As a maddened panther, wounded, rushes forth to deal death right and left, even tearing its own flesh with tooth and claw, the British column burst south across the land, crazed with wounds, famished, athirst, blood-mad, dealing death and ruin to all that lay before it.
Terrible was the vengeance that followed it, hovered on its gasping flanks, scourged its dwindling ranks, which withered under the searching fire from every tuft of bushes, every rock, every tree-trunk.
Already the ghastly pageant had rushed past us, leaving a crimson trail in its wake; already the old tavern door was flung wide, and our Minute Men were running down the Boston Road and along the ridges on either side, firing as they came on.
I, with Mount and the Weasel, hung to their left flank till two o'clock, when, about half a mile from Lexington Meeting-house, we heard cannon, and understood that the relief troops from Boston had come up.
Then, knowing that there were guns enough and to spare without ours, we shouldered our hot rifles and trudged back to "Buckman's Tavern," through the dust, behind a straw-covered wain which was driving slowly under the heat of an almost vertical sun.
Mount, parched with thirst, hailed the driver of the wain, asking him if he carried cider.
"Only a wounded man," he said, "most dead o' the red dragoons."
I stepped to the slowly moving wagon and looked over the tail-board down into the straw.
"Shemuel!" I cried.
"Shemuel!" roared Mount.
The little Jew opened his sick eyes under his bandage. The Weasel climbed nimbly over the tail-board and settled down beside the wounded man, taking his blood-smeared hand.
"Shemuel! Shemuel! We saw them split your head!" stammered Mount, in his astonishment and joy.
"Under my hat I did haff a capful of shillings," replied Shemuel, weakly; "I—I go back—two days' time to find me my money by dot Lechemere swamp—eh, Jack?"
"God bless you, old nosey!" cried Mount; "we'll get your money, lad! Won't we, Cardigan?"
The little Jew turned his heavy eyes on me.
"You haff found Miss Warren?" he gasped. "Ach, so iss all well. I go back—two days' time—find me my money." He smiled and closed his eyes.
So we re-entered Lexington, Jack Mount, the Weasel, Saul Shemuel, and I; and on the tavern steps Silver Heels stood, her tired, colourless face lighted up, her outstretched hands falling on my shoulders; and I to take her in my arms, for she had fallen a-weeping. Above us the splendid blue of the sky spread its eternal tent, our only shelter, our only home on the long trail through the world; our lamp was the sun, our fireplace a continent, and the four winds our walls, and our estates were bounded by two oceans, washing the shores of a land where the free, at last, might dwell.
In the south the thunder of the British cannon muttered, distant and more distant; the storm had passed.
Had the storm passed? The smoke hung in the north where Concord town was burning, yet around us birds sang.
And now came Jack Mount, riding postilion on the horses which drew the post-chaise; behind him trotted the Weasel, leading out Warlock. Silver Heels saw them and stood up, smiling through her tears.
"Truly, we stayed and did our duty, did we not, dear heart?"
"With your help, sweet."
"And deserted not our own!"
"Yours the praise, dear soul."
"And did face our enemies like true people all; is it not so, Michael?"
"It is so."
"Then let us go, my husband. I am sick for my own land, and for the happiness to come."
"Northward we journey, little sweetheart."
"To the blue hills and the sweet-fern?"
"Ay, home."
And so we started for the north, out of the bloody village where our liberty was born at the first rifle-shot, out of the sound of the British cannon, out of the land of the salt sea, back to the inland winds and the incense of our own dear forests, and the music of sweet waters tumbling where the white pines sing eternally.
I rode Warlock beside the chaise; Shemuel lay within; Silver Heels sat beside the poor, hurt creature, easing his fevered head; but her eyes ever returned to me, and the colour came and went in her face as our eyes spoke in silence.
"Good-bye," said Foxcroft, huskily.
Mount squared himself in his saddle; the Weasel, rifle on thigh, set his horse's head north.
Slowly the cavalcade moved on; the robins sang on every tree; far to the southward the thunder of the British cannon rolled and re-echoed along the purple hills; and over all God's golden light was falling on life, and love, and death.