Quickly the chaise turned, and they rode back to Wetherby’s. The moon was higher in the eastern sky, and the hands of the clock pointed to the figure nine when the officers rode past the house.
“We must put Adams and Hancock on their guard,” said Mr. Gerry; and a little later a messenger on horseback was scurrying along a bypath towards Lexington.
In Boston, Abraham Duncan was keeping his eyes and ears open.
“What’s the news, Billy?” was his question to Billy Baker, apprentice to Mr. Hall, who sold toddy to the redcoats.
“I guess something is going to happen,” said Billy.
“What makes you think so?”
“’Cause a woman who belongs to one of the redcoats was in just now after a toddy; she said the lobsters were going somewhere.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes; and they are packing their knapsacks.”
Abraham whispered it to Doctor Warren, and a few minutes later William Dawes was mounting his old mare and riding toward Roxbury. She was thin in flesh, and showed her ribs; and the man on her back, who dressed calf-skins for a living, jogged along Cornhill as if in no hurry. The red-coated sentinels, keeping guard by the fortifications on the Neck, said to themselves he was an old farmer, but were surprised to see him, after passing them, going like the wind out towards Roxbury, to the Parting Stone, then turning towards Cambridge, making the gravel fly from her heels as she tore along the road.