The Philadelphia coach with passengers from Maryland and Virginia came swaying up, horses dancing, guard standing by the boot, and sounding his long coaching-horn—a gallant equipage, with its blue gear and claret body showing through a skin of half-dry mud.
I glanced up at the outside travellers, thinking I might know some face among them, yet not expecting it. There were no familiar faces. I wheeled my horse to watch the coach go by, glancing idly at the window where a young girl leaned out, sucking a China orange. Our eyes met for a moment; the girl dropped the orange and stared at me; I also eyed her sharply, certain that I had seen her somewhere in the world before this. The coach passed. I sat on my horse, looking after it, cudgelling my wits to remember that red-cheeked, buxom lass, who seemed to know me, too.
Then, as our chaise rattled by, with the post-boys urging the horses, and Jack Mount on the box, it came to me in a flash that the girl was the thief-taker's daughter from Fort Pitt.
I rode up beside Mount and told him in a low voice that Billy Bishop's buxom lass was ahead of us in the Philadelphia coach, and that he had best keep his wits and eyes cleared for Billy Bishop himself.
He shrugged his shoulders, not answering, but I noticed he was alert enough now, unconsciously fingering his rifle, while his quick eyes roamed restlessly as the chaise passed in between the British earthworks on the Neck.
Truly this Captain-General Thomas Gage, whom the King of England loved so well, had cut Boston from the land as neatly as his royal master had cut it from the sea.
The Roxbury road ran through a narrow passage between two bastions of earth, surrounded with a heavy abatis and trous de loup. In the left bastion I could see magazines and guard-houses, and beyond it, near the shore, a small square redoubt, a block-house, and a battery of six cannon. In the right bastion there was a guard-house, and beyond that a block-house on the shore of the mud-flats, while farther out in the shallow water lay a floating battery.
Our chaise rolled in through the earthworks and down a causeway surrounded by water. This was Boston Neck, a strip of made land not wider than a high-road, and blocked at the northern extremity by a solid military work of stone and earth, bristling with cannon.
The gate guards eyed us sullenly as we drove into the city and up a long, dusty road called Orange Street. We continued to Newbury Street, to Marlborough Street, Mount directing us, thence through Cornhill to Queen Street, where we drew up at a very elegant mansion.
Dismounting, I took Mrs. Hamilton from the carriage, and she unmasked, for the fire was dying out in the western heavens.