Sometime after that—she never knew how long—Kitty knelt beside the newest soldier to arrive. His head was bloody, and he wore a rough shirt and breeches like all the rest, but on his feet were the fine polished boots worn by the men in the British Army. When she washed the blood away, she found she was bending over Gerry Malory.
Chapter Fifteen
A TERRIBLE BLACK DAY
“We be going down this hill now,” said Colonel John Stark, “to fortify and hold the rail fence there.”
He stood out boldly on the bold bare top of Bunker Hill, his new blue and buff coat unfastened at the neck, his musket held lightly but warily in his hand. His New Hampshire troops were drawn up before him, farmers and woodsmen for the most part, and dressed as befitted their callings. They wore homespun shirts and breeches dyed in the sober colors of late autumn, after the red and gold are gone. They carried a variety of weapons: here a fowling piece made by a village blacksmith; there an ancient queen’s arm left over from the Siege of Louisburg thirty years ago; there a blunderbuss older than Plymouth Colony.
Tom Trask, who carried the blunderbuss, looked past his colonel at the whole of Charlestown peninsula spread out before him in the early afternoon sun. Below, on Breed’s Hill, that Prescott’s engineers had made the surprise decision to fortify, stood the redoubt. He could look down into it, just as if he were standing in the top of a tree. The men had built wooden platforms to fire from, and they were massed and waiting behind their guns. Farther down, on the point of land between the sparkling blue rivers, the scarlet pride of the British Army sprawled on the grass eating its dinner.
Stark went on, his voice low but piercing, a tenseness in it that made a man’s blood run hot with courage, rather than cold with fear. He gestured toward the shores of the Mystic, the side of the field away from Boston.
“To the left of the redoubt, lads, you can see a rail fence, and Knowlton’s men have banked it with cut hay. But past the rail fence there’s an open stretch along the river, wide enough to drive a team of horses through. We’ll go down there now and build a stone wall across it. Isn’t a man among you don’t know how to build a stone wall.”
He paused and looked proudly around him. “And when it’s built, we’ll take our stand there, there and along the fence, and fight. If there’s a man among you don’t know how to do that, he can go home.”
The road back to the safety of Medford lay broad and smooth behind them, but nobody turned toward that road. They started to cheer, but the colonel held up his hand.
“Wait till you got something to cheer for, boys,” he said. “But remember this—all! Don’t shoot till they be within fifty yards. Pick out the officers. Fire low, and aim at the crossing of their belts. Hit for the handsome coats and the commanders.”