"Why not, sweetheart?" he said, compelled to smile at her anxiety. "We know what we have to face in these distracting times; we knew it when we married. Matters grow worse with every week, each day almost. But we must be brave, my darling, and you will best hold me to my duty by keeping a stout heart, no matter whether I go or stay. And go I am pretty sure to, the same as every other man in the town, for we may look, any day, for a battle somewhere about Boston."
Mary clung to him shudderingly, but was silent.
Hugh Knollys had been all this time at Cambridge, where troops were mustering from every part of the land; and many men from Marblehead were there or in the neighborhood.
They had heard from him but once, and then through Johnnie Strings, who, after this last trip—now over a month since—had returned to Cambridge with a very indefinite notion as to when he would come back to the old town.
The pedler also reported having seen Aunt Penine, who was quartered near Boston, at the house of some royalist relatives of her brother's wife,—he himself having left his home in Lynn and taken up arms for the King.
Mistress Knollys was also away, for she had closed her homestead and gone to stop with an only sister living at Dorchester,—doing this for safety, and before the soldiers left the Neck.
A decided feeling of impending war was now sharpened and well defined, and all were waiting for the actual clash of arms.
Late in February, His Majesty's ship "Lively," mounting twenty guns, arrived in the harbor and came to anchor off the fort; and her officers proceeded to make themselves fully as obnoxious as had the hated soldiers.
They diligently searched all incoming vessels that could by any pretext be suspected; and where they found anything in the nature of military stores, these were confiscated.
One vessel, carrying a chest of arms destined for the town, was, although anchored close to the "Lively," boarded one night by a party of intrepid young men under the lead of one Samuel R. Trevett, who succeeded in removing the arms, which they concealed on shore.