And this was the last vision that Richard had of her—the vivid, glowing picture he carried in his heart through the long campaigns, whether it was as he rushed through the smoke-swirls of battle or bivouacked under the cold, white stars.
CHAPTER III.
ONWARD TO VALLEY FORGE.
“He is the freeman whom the truth makes free,
And all are slaves besides.”
—Cowper.
The colony of North Carolina had long been ready for rebellion against kingly authority. Governor Tryon had sown the seeds of discontent by his unpopular measures, and the taxes levied upon the people that he might build his “palace” at New Berne. This discontent had culminated in the insurrection of the Regulators and the battle of Alamance, where was made the first armed stand against England. But Tryon was victorious, and the captured leaders of the insurrection were hanged on Regulators’ hill in Hillsboro’-town. But from that field of Alamance, the defeated people carried to their homes the same persistent, haunting dream of liberty which was to rise incarnate when the tocsin of the Revolution blew through the land.
That tocsin waked many an echo among the hills that surrounded the town upon the Eno. At the first call to arms, the older men had gone to the field, some marching away to the north, others serving under the partisan leaders throughout their own section. Now the younger ones—those who had been but boys when the cannon at Lexington made the pulse of the people first to quicken and throb—were going out to bear their share in the fray.
For the past year the company of which Richard Clevering was a member had done service in the militia at home, keeping the Tories in a semblance of subjection, and now and then going to Sumter’s aid when he made one of those electrical sallies which were like lightning flashes amid the general storm. In this hard school Richard had learned his first lessons in soldiering; but graver and sterner military work was now ahead, for the company was marching northward to aid in recruiting Washington’s regular army, reduced and discouraged by the terrible winter at Valley Forge.