“I have all respect for General Ward,” answered Scarlett, “but you’ll pardon me if I say that he’s too conservative. You’d gain a friend to your plan at once if you spoke to General Putnam or Stark, or one of their kind. A man must have a spice of daring to grasp opportunities.”
After that night the boys saw a great deal of Henry Knox. Indeed, also, he gradually came to be a man of importance in the camp. For his services at Bunker Hill he was made a colonel; and a practical, enterprising officer he proved to be.
The days went on, and Washington labored with the force newly under his command. Powder continued to be a scarce article in the camp. At no time was there above nine rounds to a man, and with this slender supply, the general had to maintain a constantly extending line of posts—posts always exposed to the concentrated assaults of well-ordered veterans. But he clung grimly to the task; little by little his ideas began to be seen, order gradually arose out of confusion; his brigadiers grasped his intentions readily, and so things began to shape themselves as he wanted them.
More than twenty thousand able men were desired to carry out Washington’s designs. There were only seventeen thousand enrolled; and of these less than fifteen thousand were fit for service. Recruiting was carried on throughout New England. Eloquent speakers harangued village crowds, and their highly colored words drew the young men constantly to the camp at Cambridge.
The environs of Boston at this time presented an animated sight. Fortifications were everywhere; men labored for the cause of liberty with mattock and spade; they drilled ceaselessly; whole towns, so it seemed, were given up to the military; white tents were pitched in orderly lines in the fields. Only a century before the two principal passes into Boston—Charlestown Neck and Boston Neck—had been fortified to save the town from the Indians and so preserve American civilization. Now the hills that commanded these same passes were peopled with the descendants of those who had formerly defended them and they were arrayed in the pride of war; their hands were raised against the oppressive government that should have fostered them, but which, instead, sought to crush them out.
While Washington was bringing order to his army and strengthening his position, he was also constantly seeking to confine the operations of the enemy and cut off their supply of provisions. Attacks were carefully guarded against; parties in whale boats were afloat each night to watch the waters; the American pickets grew as keen as night-birds, so accustomed were they to search the darkness.
Sudden assaults, made by parties on both sides, marked the summer, and the fighting on the islands continued. British transports arrived from time to time, filled with additional troops; now and then the King’s batteries opened fire upon an American work which they fancied was being pushed too far; on the sea, the Yankee privateers were increasing in numbers and in power; scarcely a week passed that the city did not receive news of some daring deed of theirs.
Then finally the long expected party of Southern riflemen arrived. These had enlisted at the first echo of the war and they had marched from four to seven hundred miles in their anxiety to face their country’s enemies.
They were bronzed, hardy looking men, dressed in hunting-shirts and coonskin caps. They carried rifles, the length of which caused the boys to open their eyes.
“They look like marksmen,” said Ezra Prentiss. “I have heard that the backwoodsmen in their colony are very expert with the rifle.”