“Tom, Tom, the piper’s son/He ran away with Father’s gun!” sang Sally Rose under her breath.
“Hummp!” snorted Gran.
Kitty looked across the plowed fields to where the Merrimack flowed behind a hedge of willows. They dipped their long green boughs in the flooding stream, and here and there the water gave back a flash of bright sun. How peaceful everything looked in the soft April afternoon. How hard it was to believe that the lads she knew might be facing the redcoats’ bayonets only a few miles off. But everyone did believe it. Everyone was frightened and apprehensive. Folk turned out everywhere to shade their eyes and watch the roads that led southward, Boston way.
It was more than twenty-four hours since Tom Trask had made off with the old blunderbuss, but Granny was still scolding about it. She would have scolded more, probably, if there hadn’t been so many chores for all of them, getting supplies ready to send after the Minutemen. All day yesterday they had baked, and this morning she and Sally Rose had gone from door to door collecting old linen for bandages. Then Uncle Moses Chase brought the borrowed wagon and suggested that the three of them might help by driving into the country to see what they could procure from the cellars and smoke houses of the farmers round.
“If you’d let it go to one o’ the Port lads—say Dick Moody, now—I could have understood,” Granny rambled on. “Why, I don’t know how many years that gun has been in our family! My grandmother told me it was brought from England in the days of the coming over. Her father got it in trade for an old horse down in Plymouth County.”
Kitty gave a sudden giggle. “Tom said it looked old enough to belong to Adam,” she said. She pulled her bonnet off and felt the warm sunlight on her brown hair, felt a warmth inside her when she said his name.
“Hoity-toity, so we call him ‘Tom’!” cried Granny.
Sally Rose reached out and caught her grandmother’s ruffled taffeta sleeve. “Granny,” she said, “there’s a farmhouse down that cart track under the shagbark trees. Uncle Moses said to call at every place and not miss a single one.”
Kitty gave her cousin a grateful glance as Granny turned the sorrel off the highway and into a rutted lane. Stone walls bordered the fields on each side of them, and little brooks of water flowed in the gutters, draining the wet black land. In one field a plow stood abandoned in mid-furrow, and half a dozen cows waited patiently at the bars, but nobody came to drive them off to pasture.
“Can’t be anyone at home,” said Granny, “’Bijah Davis lives here, and he’d never treat his animals so.”