“Don’t you think I’d better go with Kitty?” asked Sally Rose eagerly. “Lead’s apt to be heavy, you know, and—”
“What she can’t carry, the shop will send after her, I don’t doubt,” replied Granny. “Sally Rose, you start yourself for the flour barrels. Take half rye and half cornmeal....”
Sally Rose pouted. Kitty knew she was pouting, although she did not look at her. She tied on her new chip hat with the velvet roses, and hastened through the garden, into the street.
“Kitty, take off that hat and put on your old serge hood!” Granny called after her. “It looks like there’ll be a shower any minute.” Kitty pretended not to hear her.
She walked down the hill into the town, past Mr. Dalton’s mansion house and the Wolfe Tavern. People still loitered about in little groups, but last night’s excitement seemed to have given place to a quieter mood, uneasiness, anxiety, perhaps fear. The shoemaker stood in front of his gabled shop, a wooden last in one hand and a strip of purple kid in the other, talking to a grizzled old man who peddled clams in Water Street.
“No, we’ve heard no more,” he was saying. “No more o’ the Concord Fight, or our lads that marched away. Whole colony’s up, though. Half Essex County’s gone, the stage driver says, and the men way out west beyond Boston are moving in from their side. Hope to squeeze the British in between.”
“Aye,” said the peddler. “The Hampshire lads has started across the river, too. Some by ferry, and some with smacks and dories, and they say there’ll be more. The word’s gone inland, way beyond Rockingham.”
“You mean they’re going to make cause with us and fight the King’s men?” asked the shoemaker, twisting the strip of purple kid in his hand.
The peddler nodded. “They’ve long been sworn to. And everywheres now, them as was undecided whether to go Whig or Tory has got to make up their minds. You’ll find things’ll be different, now blood’s been spilt.”
Kitty walked on, and the words echoed disturbingly in her head. The street sloped sharply down to the water, with shops along both sides—the milliner’s, the baker’s, the butcher’s—shutters down and doors wide open, just as on other days, but nobody seemed to be buying anything. Most of the shopkeepers, like the shoemaker, had joined the uneasy groups in the street outside.