“Huh!” said Granny. “Cambridge is a good ways off. I hope Timothy took the plum cake. Come, girls! Now that I’ve satisfied my mind, I’m going home.”
“Oh no, Gran,” pleaded Sally Rose, composed and sure of herself again, now that she felt reasonably certain her British Gerry had come to no harm. “I want to go up to the green and see them off. It’ll hearten them to have us there, to have us wave them good luck as they march away.”
“Nonsense!” snapped Granny. “The lads will have other things on their minds. They got no time now for yellow hair.”
The squeal of a fife and the solemn throb of a beating drum broke through the shouts of the crowd on the training green.
“But I don’t want to go back to bed,” pouted Sally Rose.
“And why did you think you were going back to bed, miss?” Granny demanded. “Parson Cary says there’s a war begun. That means we’ll into the attic and try to find those bullet molds I put away when I hoped we wouldn’t need them any more. They haven’t been used since your grandfather’s time, but I think likely they’re still there.”
Chapter Three
TWO TO BEGIN
“I told you they’d fight,” said the young man grimly, biting the end of a cartridge and letting a thin stream of black powder dribble into the pan of his flintlock. He knelt at the tail gate of the farm wagon that rattled and swayed from side to side as Sergeant Higgs of the Twenty-third drove it pell-mell down the Charlestown Road.
His hat was gone and his red coat in tatters. His white breeches were stained with gunpowder and the blood of the wounded men who lay on the floor of the wagon; stained, too, with the gray earth of this unfamiliar country, so unlike the ruddy loam of his native Devonshire.
“I told you they’d fight,” he repeated. “I been amongst ’em, and I know.”