“Halloo there!” he shouted, striving to rise from the not very comfortable blanket that dropped in twain to the left and the right, as he shook off the tools and returned from the land of sleep to Dorchester Heights and the 5th of March. He was just in time to hear a voice like a clarion cry out: “Remember it is the 5th of March, and avenge the death of your brethren.”
It was the very voice that had said in the swamp in the night that “General Washington 61 would gladly change places with Jeremy Jagger.” It was the voice of General Washington animating the troops for the coming battle.
Meanwhile a new and unexpected force arrived on the field of action. It came in from sea—a great and mighty wind, that tossed and tumbled the transports to and fro on the waves and would not let them land anywhere save at the place they came from. So they went peacefully back to Boston, and the Liberty Men over on the hills went on all day and all night, in the rain and the wind, building up, strengthening, fortifying, in fact getting ready, as Jeremy told his aunt, when he reached home on the morning of the sixth of March, “for a visit from King George and all his army.”
The next day General Howe doubted and did little. The next and the next went on and then on the morning of the 17th of March something new had happened. There was one little hill, so near to Boston that it was almost in it; and lo! in the night it had been visited by the Americans, and a Liberty Cap perched above its head.
General Howe said: “We must get away from here in haste.”
“Take us with you,” said a thousand Royalists of the town; and he took them, bag and baggage, to wander up and down the earth.
Over on Bunker Breed’s Hill wooden sentinels did duty when the British soldiers left and for full two hours after; and then two brave Yankees 62 guessed the men were wooden, and marched in to take possession just nine months from the day they bade it good-by, because they had no powder with which to “tune” their guns.
Over on Cambridge Common marched, impatient as ever, General Putnam, with his four thousand followers, ready to cross the River Charles and walk once more the city streets of the good old town. On all the hills were gathered men, women and children to see the British troops depart.
Jeremy Jagger was up before the dawn on that sweetest of Sunday mornings in March, and he reached the Roxbury lines just as General Ward was ready to put his arms about Boston’s Neck. The lad took his place with the five hundred men and walked by Ensign Richards’ side, as he proudly bore the standard up to the gates, which Ebenezer Learned “unbarred and opened.” Once within the lines, Jeremy, unmindful of the crow’s feet strewn over the way, made haste through lane and street to his old home on Beacon Hill. “Could that be his mother looking out at him through the window-pane?” he thought, as he drew near.
She saw him. She knew him. But what could it mean that she did not open the door to let him in; that she waved him away? It could not be that she, his own mother, had turned Tory, that her face was grown so red and angry at the sight of her son.