The instant Major Porter had set little Polly Lewis on the porch Mrs. Porter was beside him, 189 begging that he would look for Ethel and care for the boy if he found him. The promise was given, and looking well despite the uncommon heat, the Major, in all the glory of his military equipment, set forth.
From that moment all was noise and call and confusion without. Men went by singly, in groups, in squads, in companies, mounted and on foot. It is a matter of public record that twelve militia companies, with their respective captains, went from Waterbury alone to assist New Haven in the day of its peril. It is no marvel that they set off with speed, for the horrors of the Danbury burning was yet fresh in memory.
In the long kitchen, as the heated hours went by, the brick oven was fired again and again until the very stones of the chimney expanded with glowing heat, and the last swallow forsook its ancient nest in despair. The sun was in the west when Mr. Porter, with a bag of wheat on one side of the saddle and a bag of rye on the other, appeared at the kitchen entrance and summoned help to unload, but his accustomed helpers were gone. Even Cato, the reliable, was missing. Phyllis and Nancy received the wheat and the rye.
“Mother,” said Mr. Porter, “I had to do the grinding myself—couldn’t find a man to do it, and I knew it couldn’t be done here to-day, water’s too low. Where are the boys?” he questioned, as he entered and looked around. When informed, 190 his sole ejaculation was, “I ought to have known that boys always have gone and always will go after soldiers.”
“Don’t worry, mother,” he added to his wife, as she stood looking wistfully down the road.
There were tears in her eyes as she said: “Not a boy left.”
“Why yes, mother, here comes Stephen and Stiles Hotchkiss up the road. My! how tired and hot the boys and the horses do look!” exclaimed Polly.
Stephen waited for no reprimand. He forestalled it by saying: “Captain Hotchkiss let Stiles and me go far enough to see the British troops—way off, ever so far—but we saw ’em, we did, didn’t we, Stiles?”
“Come! come!” said Mr. Porter, while the lad’s mother stood with her hand on his head. “Stephen, tell us all about it!”
“Captain Hotchkiss said he was a boy once, and if we’d promise him to go home the minute he told us to, he’d take us along. Well! we kept meeting folks running away from New Haven, with everything on ’em but their heads. One woman was lugging a lot of salt pork, ‘because she couldn’t bear to have the Britishers eat it all up;’ and another woman was carrying away a lot of candles hanging by a string, and the sun had melted the last drop of tallow, leaving the wicks dangling against the tallow on her dress, but she didn’t know it; and mother, would you 191 believe it—Mr. Timothy Atwater told Captain Hotchkiss that he met a woman whom he knew hurrying out of town with a cat in her arms. When he asked her where her children were, she said, ‘Why, at home I suppose.’ ‘Well,’ said Mr. Atwater, ‘hadn’t you better leave the cat and go back and get them?’ And she said, ‘Perhaps she had,’ and went back for ’em.”