He lifted his head and stepped back. Tom stood close enough to see his burning eyes and the unflinching line of his mouth. “I don’t know how the rest o’ you feel,” Stark went on, “but for myself, I’ll fight to the last drop o’ blood in me. By the great Jehovah, I mean to live free or die!”
“Fall in!” he shouted. He held up his arm and made a swooping motion toward the rail fence. The New Hampshire regiments followed him down the hill.
Once on the narrow strip of muddy beach beyond the fence, they worked desperately to rear a wall across it before the British should come on. Some fetched stones from other walls that divided the pastures on the hillside. Others toiled to heap them in a bulwark straight to the water’s edge. Tom was with those who carried boulders flung from the bank and piled them ready to the builder’s hand. Once he climbed up the ledge himself to take a look at the field above.
“Hey, Caleb,” he called eagerly, as he noticed a young man standing where the rail fence ended, a musket in his hand.
Colonel Stark’s first-born son, sixteen-year-old Caleb, turned around and a grin broke over his lean face as he recognized his old hunting companion. He stepped forward.
“Tom!” he exclaimed. “Haven’t seen you since you left for Newburyport with the log raft, back sometime in the spring.”
“No, I ain’t had a chance to get home. Ever since Concord Fight I been in camp. Where you been?”
“Round home mostly. Just got here this morning. Word’s gone all around the countryside that the British be about to attack. Figured my dad could use another man. Say, Tom, Jean’s been asking about you—”
Fife and drum music burst forth from the red-coated ranks below the hill, and the bugles uttered an urgent cry.
“Here they come!” yelled Tom. He leaped down the bank and ran to where he had left his blunderbuss, in the center of the stone wall.