“Them lights over there must be Boston,” Johnny told him. “You ever been there, Tom? I heard it’s the greatest city in North America. The best anyway.”
“Didn’t know we had any other cities,” said Tom, grinning in the darkness.
Johnny took him seriously. “Course we have,” he hastened to protest. “There’s New York, and Philadelphia where the Great Congress meets. Some others further south, I guess, and all of ’em sending help to Boston. There’s talk they’ll even send their soldiers here.”
“Believe it when I see them,” said Tom skeptically. “But you ask me, and I say no, I never been to Boston. I live a sight of a ways off, you know, up the Merrimack.”
They stood there together a moment in the starlight and cool sea wind, the sweetness of ripe hay.
“I know,” said Johnny. “You didn’t go back there, ever—after we got news of Concord Fight, did you? Ain’t you got some folks waiting for you to come home?”
Tom shrugged. “Folks is all dead,” he told Johnny. “Won’t nobody miss me. Well—maybe a girl or two.”
Then he spoke more quickly and in a lighter tone. “But I know where I will be missed, I bet, and that’s back in Medford. My company was less than half full strength when I left, and I better be getting myself over there. How about you?”
“I ought to be in Cambridge, I guess, with Captain Little’s company.”
“Moses Little? Heard he’d been made a colonel, just like Stark.”