“British! No! They be still drinking and gambling in Boston, and like to stay there till the blast of Gabriel’s horn, if you ask me. These soldiers are our own lads, and they sent the word about that since they’ve entrenched themselves on a hill the British wanted, they look for a battle.”
“If—if there is a battle, what will we do?” asked Kitty.
“We’ll do what is needed,” said Gran shortly. “Right now I want you to wake Sally Rose. Put on your oldest dresses and good stout shoes. No flounces and toothpick heels, mind. Pick up whatever valuables you have and bring them to me.”
Sally Rose, still sleepy-eyed, was enchanted at the prospect of adventure. She brought a whole little chest full of trinkets when they returned to the kitchen. Kitty had only her mother’s cameo brooch, and she pinned that inside her bodice. Gran held out a willow basket full of the carefully wrapped silver.
“You girls take this down to the graveyard and bury it,” she ordered. “If the British come pouring in here tomorrow morning, looking for what they can find, new-turned earth in a graveyard will occasion no comment.” Across the lid of the basket she laid a wooden shovel.
Carrying the basket between them, the girls picked their way through the town in the warm, dim starlight. Here and there they passed by little groups of men who seemed to be patrolling the streets, who looked at them curiously but uttered no challenge. Lights were burning across the river in Boston and on the masts of the Somerset lying at anchor in mid-channel. Cries of “All’s Well!” sounded faintly at intervals from its decks and from the sentries in the town beyond it.
There were no lights or sentries apparent on Bunker Hill, nor yet on Breed’s, when they looked that way, but both hillsides seemed to be alive with moving masses of shadow; a low hum rose above them like the swarming of many hives of bees. Now and then there was a tiny flash of light, or a clang as a shovel hit against stone.
Kitty dug a shallow pit under the flowering quince tree where she had talked with Gerry Malory, and Sally Rose helped to cover it over, once the silver and her own treasures lay safe inside. Then they hurried back to the Bay and Beagle. Gran was trotting about the kitchen, setting many pans of bread to rise, pulling down hams from the rafters, heating the bake ovens red hot.
“Get to work, girls,” she said as they came in, handing Kitty a carving knife and Sally Rose a wooden spoon. “Can’t tell how many men we may have to feed tomorrow.”
When they finished the preparations she considered necessary, they sank down exhausted on benches drawn to the oak table. Kitty noticed that the hands of the tall old clock pointed to a quarter past three.