“Oh, sir,” Dick cried, his whole face lighted with pleasure. “I should like it very much, but—” he stepped nearer his own commander, “I do not want to be released unless my Colonel may come with me.”
The British officer considered a moment. Then, in a sudden impulse of kindness, he granted Dick’s request.
“Colonel Webb may go too, on parole,” he said.
Dick went home for a week in Hartford after his first fight. There had never been such a hero as he among the other boys and girls. He could not stir outside of his gate without a crowd of them following at his heels, begging for tales of his adventures, a button, or a scrap of lining from his coat. The little soldier did not care for fame, though. He longed to be back in the thick of the fight so he put his fife to his lips again and rejoined his regiment. They were glad to see him. They had missed his cheerful tunes.
Dick was with the regiment when the great Kosciusko helped them to fortify West Point. He marched over rough and frozen ground two hundred miles to Morristown, but at the end of the weary way General Washington greeted him. The winter of privation and exposure that followed was not so hard for Dick to bear because he was sharing it with the great Washington. No other boy had so great an honor.
Through the three years of his enlistment Dick faced whatever hardships came to him without a whimper and the sound of his cheerful fife tunes comes down to us through all these years as one of the helps to America’s freedom. He was honorably discharged from the Continental Army when he was a little more than thirteen years old and, with an escort of two soldiers, he walked two hundred miles home.
No one asked him now what he could do for his country. Dick was the hero of the children and everyone else in Hartford. When the Revolution was over and the Stars and Stripes waved over the free Colonies Dick knew that he had helped in winning his country’s independence.
[Betsy’s Guest]
Betsy looked with delight at the dainty white frock spread out on the big four-poster bed in the spare room.