While Tom, who was to be sixteen in February, looked older, his brothers appeared younger than their years, and were two saucy, clever, reckless lads. A look of child-like innocence was part of the protective capital the twins invested in mischief. They fought one another, made common cause against the world, and had, as concerned Tom, a certain amount of respect founded on physical conditions. At the close of this year 1777, Sir William Howe held the city of Penn with some eighteen thousand men. Twenty miles away George Washington waited in his lines at Valley Forge with three or four thousand half-starved soldiers.
Between the two armies Nature had established a nearly neutral ground, for on it lay the deepest snow the land had known for many a year. It was both foe and friend to the Continental soldiers, whom starvation and cold were daily tempting to desertion, and among whom disease in many forms was busily recruiting for the army of the dead.
The well-fed British regulars in and near the city found in the snow an obstacle which forbade Sir William Howe to move, discouraged enterprise, and gave excuses for inertness, since no general at that time ventured to think of a winter campaign, until in ’78 the Virginia general read his enemy a novel lesson in the art of war.
The land between the city of Philadelphia and Valley Forge on both sides of the Schuylkill was in ’77 a fertile country of large farms to which narrow wood roads led from the main highways. On to this region of winter, scouting or foraging parties of both armies ventured at times, and from it in good weather the farmers, despite the efforts of our scant cavalry, took supplies to the snow-beleaguered city, and sometimes, if Tories, information of value.
In the best houses of the city there were quartered, to the disgust of the Whig dames, a great number of British officers. They were to be fed without charge and were unpleasant or not personally disagreeable, as chanced to be the case.
Mrs. Markham’s ample house on Third Street, near Spruce, had its share of boarders thus comfortably billeted, to the satisfaction of her Tory neighbors who were not thus burdened or who gladly entertained officers of distinction.
The owner of the house, Colonel Markham, of the Continental line, lay a prisoner in New York, when on Christmas Eve, in this year of 1777, Mrs. Markham and three unwelcome guests sat down to supper.
Tom, the elder son, stood at the window watching the big white snowflakes flitting across the black squares of the night-darkened panes.
“Come, my son,� said Mrs. Markham, and he took the vacant seat, his mind on the joys to which the weather was contributing in the way of coasting, skating, and snowball wars.
This terrible winter was one thing to Sir William Howe, another to George Washington, and a quite delightful other to Tom Markham. “I suppose, Tom,� said the mother, as he took his seat, “this sort of Christmas weather is much to your liking.�