To her who received it the one syllable was more than a page of foolscap.
XXII.
BRAVE OF HEART.
The king’s plan to punish Boston because the East India Company’s tea had been destroyed was not working very satisfactorily. Ten thousand troops were cooped up in the town with little to eat. They could obtain no fresh provisions. Lord North was sending many ships, and the ship-owners were asking high prices for the use of their vessels; for the Yankee skippers of Marblehead, Captain Manly and Captain Mugford, were darting out from that port in swift-sailing schooners, with long eighteen-pounders amidships, and the decks swarming with men who had braved the storms of the Atlantic and knew no fear, capturing the ships dispatched from England with food and supplies for the army. The ministers had paid twenty-two thousand pounds for cabbages, potatoes, and turnips; as much more for hay, oats, and beans; half a million pounds for flour, beef, and pork. They purchased five thousand oxen, fourteen thousand sheep, and thousands of pigs, that the army three thousand miles away might have something to eat. There were plenty of cattle, sheep, and pigs within fifty miles of Boston, but General Howe could not lay his hand on one of them. The winter storms were on, and the ships sailing down the Thames or from Bristol Channel had a hard time of it before losing sight of the hills of Devon. The people along the Cornwall shores beheld the seashore strewn with carcasses of cattle, sheep, and pigs, tossed overboard from the decks of foundering vessels. The few cattle that survived the six weeks’ tossing on the sea were but skin and bones when the ships dropped anchor by Castle William.
In contrast, Tom Brandon and the soldiers under General Washington had plenty of good food. It was a tantalizing handbill which Benjamin Edes printed on his press at Watertown.
Tom Brandon, on picket at Charlestown Neck, hailed the Britisher a few rods distant.
“How are you, redcoat?”
“How are you, rebel?”