Part 1

Chapter 14,207 wordsPublic domain

THE ROAD TO BUNKER HILL

_Books by_ SHIRLEY BARKER

_For Younger Readers_

THE TROJAN HORSE THE ROAD TO BUNKER HILL

_Poetry_

THE DARK HILLS UNDER A LAND AND A PEOPLE

_Novels_

PEACE, MY DAUGHTERS RIVERS PARTING FIRE AND THE HAMMER TOMORROW THE NEW MOON LIZA BOWE SWEAR BY APOLLO THE LAST GENTLEMAN CORNER OF THE MOON

SHIRLEY BARKER

The Road to Bunker Hill

DUELL, SLOAN AND PEARCE New York

_First edition_

_Affiliate of_

MEREDITH PRESS

_Des Moines & New York_

Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 62-12175

Manufactured in the United States of America for Meredith Press Van Rees Press · New York

_For_

ESTHER DOANE OSMAN

_Contents_

1. A Night to Be Young 3

2. In Readiness to March 13

3. Two to Begin 23

4. The Courage to Go and the Feet to Get Him There 33

5. The Great Ipswich Fright 42

6. Fun While It Lasted 53

7. Off to the Wars in Boston 63

8. Saved by a Pipe-smoking Man 75

9. No Clouds on Bunker Hill 87

10. A Tryst with the Enemy 101

11. A Great Secret 113

12. Thunder in the Air 125

13. The World Turned Upside Down 136

14. The Young May Die 147

15. A Terrible Black Day 160

16. Hanging and Wiving 170

THE ROAD TO BUNKER HILL

_Chapter One_

A NIGHT TO BE YOUNG

“Nothing ever happens in this town,” said Eben Poore, dangling his long legs over the edge of the wharf, and looking down river to the open sea. The sky was pale, almost white above the long sand bar of Plum Island, he noticed, but the streets were growing dark behind him, and twilight had begun to gather round the warehouses and tall-masted ships by the waterside.

“No,” agreed Dick Moody, “nothing ever happens in Newburyport. Wish we could have a ‘tea party’ like they had in Boston a spell back. I’d sure enough be glad to rig up like an Indian and heave a chest of bohea overside.”

“I guess all the merchants know better than to bring it in,” said Johnny Pettengall. “Nobody’d drink the stuff. We got no name o’ being a Tory town.”

Johnny was older than the other boys, seventeen past. He had his own gun and drilled with the militia on muster days.

“But something has happened in Newburyport,” he went on, “though I don’t suppose it would mean very much to either o’ you.”

“What did happen?” asked Dick lazily. “Somebody’s cat kitten, or Indian Joe take too much rum and do a war dance in Queen Street again?”

Johnny shook his head and smiled. “Sally Rose Townsend’s back,” he said.

The other boys sat up, and their faces brightened.

“I don’t care much for girls,” said Eben, picking a piece of long brown seaweed from the dock’s end and shredding it in his fingers. “But Sally Rose is different. Maybe it’s her hair.”

“Having gold-colored hair never hurt a girl none,” declared Johnny, with the air of a man who knew about such things, a man grown. “But with Sally Rose--well, it’s the way she smiles, I think.”

“I like Kitty better,” said Dick stoutly. “Sally Rose is always grinning--at everybody. When Kitty smiles, there’s some sense to it--when she’s pleased, or you tell her a joke.”

“What’s Sally Rose doing in Newburyport this time o’ year?” asked Eben. “She comes in the summer to visit Granny Greenleaf and her cousin Kitty, but it’s still early spring--April nineteenth, for I took me a look at the almanac this morning. See, there’s the first log raft from New Hampshire just tied up today.”

The other boys looked where he pointed. Through the gathering darkness they saw that a drift of shaggy logs covered the whole surface of a little cove nearby. Lanterns flashed here and there, and a dim shouting echoed among the narrow lanes and small brick houses beside the river. The lumbermen who had brought the raft down from the great forests farther up the Merrimack, were moving about it now, making everything fast for the night.

“It’s been a warm spring,” said Johnny, smiling quietly to himself.

Dick shivered and turned up the collar of his homespun jacket. “Maybe it has,” he said, “but it’s cold enough tonight to freeze your gizzard. Hope there won’t be a frost, with the apple trees already budded and most o’ the fields plowed. But what’s that got to do with Sally Rose? Her father keeps a tavern in Charlestown, shops and houses all round, and the seasons don’t matter. Spring don’t mean nothing there.”

“There’s a lot stirring round Charlestown this spring, Sally Rose says,” continued Johnny. “Looks like the British soldiers in Boston might be ’most ready to come out and fight. We been expecting it, and we got plenty o’ powder laid by, at Concord and a few places more. Might need to use it any time now. Sally Rose’s father thought she’d be safer here.”

“Did she tell you that?” asked Eben quickly. “You’ve talked with her then?”

“Yes, I talked with her,” said Johnny. He turned his dark head a little and looked up the hill at the lighted town behind them, starlight over the dormer windows set high in the rooftops, the church steeple white against the night sky. He seemed to be watching for something. He did not say any more.

A group of sailors swaggered by, jesting and laughing, on their way to the Wolfe Tavern after grog. The spring wind brought a salt smell up from the river, a fish smell, and the clean scent of pine logs from the raft in the cove. One lone candle burned in the window of a counting house nearby and showed them a figure hunched over a tall desk and open ledger. Dick pointed suddenly toward it.

“Shiver my jib and start my planks if I’d want to be a counting-house clerk!” he exclaimed. Dick was apprenticed to his uncle in the ship-building trade, but what he wanted was to go to sea. Eben, an orphan, did chores at a boardinghouse in Chandler’s Lane, and Johnny helped his father on their farm below the town, a farm known for its poor soil and salt hay.

Before anyone could answer him, a girl’s laugh rang out, somewhere in the shadowy streets above.

“That’s Sally Rose!” cried Eben. “I’d know her laugh in Jamaicy--if I was to hear it there! She--she--you knew she was coming down here, Johnny! You knew!”

“Yes, I knew,” said Johnny. There was a light in his eye, a reflection from the counting-house candle, perhaps. “She said she and Kit might take a walk this way, if Granny Greenleaf would let them out.”

“Well, Granny did,” cried Dick, “for she’s coming, and Kitty with her. Look there!”

Two girls came tripping gaily toward them, their full skirts sweeping the rutted lane, little white shawls drawn about their shoulders, their hair brushed back from their faces and falling in curls behind. One girl’s hair was soft brown, and the other’s yellow like Indian corn.

The boys stood up. Johnny went forward. “I been waiting for you, Sally Rose,” he said.

Sally Rose walked slowly toward him, her head lifted, her eyes shining. She put out both her hands. “My, you’re handsome, Johnny,” she said. “I’d forgotten how handsome you were. We don’t have lads like you in Charlestown, you know.”

Johnny gripped both her hands against the front of his jacket and took a deep breath. The other boys looked embarrassed. Eben stared down at his feet. He suddenly realized that they were bare, bare and not very clean. He owned a pair of shoes, of course, but he only wore them on Sundays and in the wintertime.

“Glad you came back, Sally Rose,” he said, not looking at her.

“Oh, thank you, Eben,” she answered sweetly. “I’m so glad that you’re glad.”

Johnny opened his eyes wide and gave Eben an unfriendly stare.

“Hey, Kit,” said Dick, “I haven’t seen you since--”

The brown-haired girl smiled. “You’d have seen me if you’d looked,” she said. “I passed you by the ropewalk last Friday afternoon. I was going to Polly Little’s to bring home some tulip bulbs for Granny. I waved to you, but you wouldn’t see me. You were too busy cleaning a tar barrel.”

Dick looked down at the worn planks of Somerby’s Wharf. It was dark beside the river now, and the only light came from the windowpanes of the small houses along the street.

“I’m sorry, Kitty,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter, Dick,” she answered. Her blue eyes smiled at him. Her voice sounded soothing and kind.

The five of them stood there, silent in the spring night and the sharp sea wind. Johnny shifted his feet uneasily. Even Sally Rose did not know what to do or say.

Finally Eben spoke. His voice quavered a little, harsh, and self-conscious, and high. “If I had a shilling,” he said, “I’d ask you all to come up to the Wolfe Tavern and have a glass of beer.”

Dick snorted. “Lot of good a shilling would do you there!” he said. “Ma’am Davenport’s real strict. She won’t sell drink to lads of thirteen.”

Eben wilted for a moment. Then Sally Rose smiled at him, and he squared his shoulders and stood up taller than before.

“I don’t care for the taste of beer,” she said. “Perhaps I see too much of it in Father’s tavern as it passes over the board. But thank you, Eben. It was a kind thought.”

She turned to Johnny, and her voice grew low and soft. “Will there be a moon?” she asked.

He answered her gruffly. “Not till later. Much later, after the bells have rung curfew; after you girls are home abed.”

“Oh--?” answered Sally Rose provocatively.

“Well, here we are, Sally Rose,” said Kitty in a brisk tone, “You said you wanted to come down to the river.”

She looked out at the dark flowing stream with the river barges and fishing smacks and deep-sea-going ships moored on its quiet surface, lanterns in their rigging, their tall masts reared against the sky, and their sails furled tight. Ships home from Virginia and the Barbados, from all over the world, maybe; their holds full of sugar and rice and wine, silks and laces and oil, India muslins, and French knickknacks, and gunpowder out of Holland--even if they carried no tea. Try as they would, the King’s laws hadn’t been able to interfere too much with trade.

“Now that you’re here,” she went on, “what do you want to do?”

“We could go for a walk through the marshes, Plum Island way,” said Sally Rose, looking at Johnny.

“All of us?” he asked her. Kitty and Eben and Dick ought to know that he meant for them to go away and leave him alone with Sally Rose. But they didn’t go.

“We could all go back to our house and have plum cake and buttermilk,” suggested Kitty. “Granny cut a new plum cake yesterday.”

Eben’s voice rose high and shrill again. “We could play hide-and-seek,” he announced boldly.

Sally Rose giggled. Then she clapped a hand over her mouth.

“That’s only for young ’uns,” muttered Dick. “I be too big for that now.”

But suddenly Kitty defended the idea.

“You’re right, of course, Dick,” she said wistfully. “But then, don’t you sometimes hate to feel you’re getting too big for the things that used to be fun? Eben’s the youngest of us, and he finished school more than a year ago. Soon we’ll be grown and married, with houses and children, and we won’t be able to run out after dark like this, and walk by the river, and watch for the moon. We’ll have to stay in, and rock babies, and split firewood, and see that the doors are locked and the table set for breakfast. It’ll come on us all so soon now.” She looked at Johnny appealingly. “Let’s have one last play night--one night to be young--before we grow too old.”

Johnny’s eyes widened suddenly, and his mouth curved in a smile. Sally Rose had a cluster of apple buds pinned on her bodice, and their sweetness hovered all about. It made him feel sad, and happy, and unsettled as a girl, ready to agree to anything, even Kitty’s daft notion.

“Right enough, Kit,” he said. “For one more night, we’ll be young. We’ll play hide-and-seek, if we never do again. I’ll count first, and the rest of you hide. This’ll be goal, this empty rum keg here.”

He sat down on the rum keg and buried his face in his hands. “Ten--fifteen--twenty--” he began slowly.

With a little squeal, Sally Rose picked up her skirts and ran to hide behind a pile of lobster crates in a far corner. The others hesitated a moment.

“Forty-five--fifty--” went on Johnny, still very slow.

They scattered then. Eben crawled under a ship’s boat, broken and lying sideways on the wharf. Dick ran into a doorway across the lane. Kitty waited until she had barely time to crouch down behind a pile of wooden boxes marked with a black “W. I.”--West India goods.

“Ninety-five--one hundred--here I come!” Johnny shouted. He stood up and peered around him, but only for a moment. In almost no time at all he found Sally Rose, but it was a little longer before he pulled her out from behind the lobster crates. Perhaps he had peeked through his fingers, Kitty thought, so that he knew where to look. Perhaps he kissed Sally Rose before they were in plain sight again.

Anyway, it was now Sally Rose’s turn to count, and she found Dick with little trouble.

But after that they really did seem to be young again, and entered into the spirit of the game. Gradually the counting got slower, and the hiding places farther and farther away. Then Sally Rose and Kitty hid together behind a heap of mackerel nets, and Eben found them both at the same time.

“Tie find! Now which of you’s to count and go seek?” asked Dick, putting up his head in the sharp wind. “Just about once more, and ’twill be curfew time, and we’ll have to go home.”

“I’ll count,” offered Kitty.

“No, let me,” said Sally Rose.

“How about me having a turn?”

It was a strange voice that spoke, a boy’s voice, quiet and cool, but with a mocking note of laughter in it.

They turned around suddenly and stared. There on the wharf behind them stood a tall fellow not much older than Johnny, with a lean face, sharp gray eyes, and sun-bleached hair. He wore cowhide boots and a loose hunting shirt over moosehide breeches. He carried a long pole with an iron barb on the end, such as the lumbermen used to break up log jams and herd the great rafts down the river.

“I’m know I’m a stranger here,” he went on, “but I ain’t poison. I been watching you awhile. I’d like a hand in the game.”

“You came down river with the logs?” asked Dick slowly.

The stranger nodded. “Aye, clear from the falls at Derryfield. A fellow can be lonely--away from his own town at night--first time away.” The sharpness went out of his eyes, and he looked younger, almost like a little boy.

“Of course you can play,” cried Kitty, sympathy in her voice. “I’ve been lonely, too, sometimes, when I went to visit Sally Rose in Charlestown, and I know what it’s like. He can count this time, can’t he, Sally Rose?”

“Of course he can,” said Sally Rose, smiling at the strange lad, flicking her lashes.

Dick and Eben looked crestfallen. Johnny kicked the side of the rum keg. “Didn’t know backwoodsmen could count,” he sneered. “Tell us what your name is, if you want to play.”

The stranger narrowed his eyes, then he opened them wide and smiled innocently. “My name’s Tom Trask,” he said, “and I can count.” He put his head down in the crook of his arm, but they did not hear the familiar “Ten--fifteen--twenty--”

After a moment, thinking he might be counting to himself, they started to straggle away. Kitty did not watch where the others went to. Seconds mattered at a time like this. She slipped behind a row of tar barrels at the corner of the counting house and stood there, listening to the water as it sucked at the piles underneath, to the sound of singing and fiddle music where the sailors were making merry on the deck of a ship moored a hundred yards off shore.

Suddenly the voice of the young logger from up the Merrimack whipped out like the command of the captain to the volunteers who drilled on Frog Pond green come muster day.

“Ten--ten--double ten--forty-five--fifteen!”

He reached his hundred all at once, leaped from the keg, and ran straight toward her, toward her, Kitty Greenleaf, of the High Street in Newburyport, who had never seen him before tonight. He ran to her, around the tar barrels, around the corner of the counting house. In a moment he had put his arms about her and kissed her on the mouth, kissed her hard.

Not used to such sudden attack, not used to kissing any lad at all, except in kissing games where everybody looked on and laughed, or when Dick bade her a shy good night sometimes by the garden wall, she struggled, and sputtered, and pulled away.

She wiped her mouth and looked up. “What--what did you do that for?” she gasped.

The gray eyes were smiling down at her, there in the chilly spring dark, the thin mouth crooked upward in a smile.

“Like I said, a lad’s lonely in a strange town at night.”

Before she could answer, she heard a soft little laugh beside them. She turned about. There stood Sally Rose. Sally Rose flickered her long lashes and opened her hazel eyes very wide.

“There’s no need for you to be lonely,” she trilled. “My, but you’re a handsome lad! We’ve none such handsome lads in Charlestown.”

Tom Trask eyed her coldly. His mouth was still smiling, but his eyes looked sharp and unfriendly in the candlelight that shone through the dusty panes of the counting-house window behind his head.

“Charlestown can’t be much of a place,” he retorted, “though I wouldn’t know, for my business never took me there, and ’tisn’t likely to. But--” He paused a moment, and his head lifted a little. “Up the Merrimack we got prettier girls than you. Maybe a score.”

Sally Rose’s eyes flashed, and she tossed her curls. “I don’t care what’s up the Merrimack. I look pretty enough in Charlestown! Pretty enough to please Captain Gerald Malory of the Twenty-third!”

The logger did not answer her. He turned around and walked slowly down the wharf. Kitty could hear the ring of the iron nails in the soles of his country boots as he strode away.

_Chapter Two_

IN READINESS TO MARCH

“Insolent plowboy!” exclaimed Sally Rose haughtily. She stood in front of the mirror wreathed with gilt cupids, her palms flat on the mahogany dressing table, and stared at her own reflection, curls loosened and falling over the shoulders of her white cambric night robe, her eyes narrowed and glinting coldly in the candlelight. Then the coldness dissolved away, and she giggled.

Kitty, lying sprawled on the patchwork counterpane that covered the great four-poster bed, giggled too, uncertainly. Sally Rose had moods that changed so fast she was never able to keep up with them. So, as usual, she didn’t try, but spoke her mind in her turn.

“He wasn’t a plowboy, he was a logger,” she said. “Maybe the owner of a whole forest as big as this parish. Some of them are, you know, those up-country lads. And he was too smart for you, Sally Rose. He knew you were making fun of him.”

Sally Rose sat down on the counterpane and hugged her knees. She looked thoughtful. “Yes, he knew,” she said. “But when I said the same thing to Johnny Pettengall, Johnny thought I meant it. Inside, I almost laughed myself to death. I wonder why I couldn’t fool that backwoods boy, when I could fool Johnny.”

“Maybe because he’s older,” suggested Kitty. “He looked older, anyway.” She got up, went to the chest, and blew the candle out.

“Yes,” reflected Sally Rose, “older, but not really a man--not so much as twenty.”

“Is that how old he is?” Kitty demanded. “Come on now, Sally Rose. Tell me all about him.”

“About who?” asked Sally Rose. “The logger? Tom Trask was his name, he said. I don’t know anything about Tom Trask, except that I caught him kissing you. I wonder why you didn’t stop him. If Granny finds out--”

“I didn’t have time to stop him,” retorted Kitty severely. “And don’t try to change the subject. The ‘him’ I want to know about is that British officer. Captain Malory of the Twenty-third.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Sally Rose uneasily. She, too, left the bed, and went to stand between the patchwork curtains at the window. It was nearly midnight. Late moonrise silvered the sky over Plum Island, and the young leaves stirred restlessly in the sea wind, hiding the quiet darkness of Granny’s crocus and daffodil beds in the garden below.

“You know you really want to tell me about him,” continued Kitty. “You always want to tell me about the lads you’ve taken a fancy to.”

Sally Rose did not turn, and when she answered, her voice was very quiet, with none of the usual merry undertones that made it so charming. “Oh, but this is different, Kitty. You guessed right--he is twenty. And Father says he’s an enemy.” She laughed ruefully. “In fact, Father says he’s a damned lobsterback, and I mustn’t see him again. But I sent him a note to tell him where I was going, and maybe.... But how did you know he was British? You only heard me say his name.”

Kitty could feel her face burn in the darkness. She still felt ashamed, though it hadn’t been her fault, really.

“I read it in a letter,” she said with some stiffness, “the letter your father wrote to Granny, telling her why he was sending you here. I went down to meet the postrider, and when he handed me a letter addressed to C. Greenleaf, I never thought that it was for Granny instead of me, and so I read it. Of course she’s Catherine, too.”

“What did Father say?” asked Sally Rose. Her voice had a worried sound.

“It began, ‘My dear,’ instead of ‘Dear Mother’--that’s why I didn’t know it was for Gran, and I kept on reading. He said ‘I’m worried about our little girl.’”

Kitty paused, and Sally Rose did not question her any further just then. Both girls looked through the window, over the roofs of the town, at the wide dark waters of the Merrimack flowing seaward.

Fifteen years ago, about this time of the year, Caleb Greenleaf had taken his wife, Becky, and his married sister, Anne Townsend, for a little jaunt on the river in the April sunshine. The young mothers had left their baby girls with Granny Greenleaf, and gone happily aboard his small fishing boat, and no one had foreseen the sudden mad wind, the squall of snow that would engulf them. Afterwards, Granny had brought up orphan Kitty, but Job Townsend had taken his motherless daughter back to Charlestown to his own people. The tragedy had brought him close to his mother-in-law, however, so that he still addressed her as ‘My dear,’ and spoke of ‘our little girl,’ and there had been much going back and forth between them.

For a long moment now, the girls stared at the dark river. Kitty was the first to take her eyes away. She did not refer to the old, sad loss, of which she knew they were both thinking.

“Your father wrote that he was sending you to stay with us for a while,” she said quietly, “to get you away from that British officer you’ve been stealing out with. He said this--this enemy--puts on a homespun shirt and leather breeches, pretends to be one of our lads, and goes wherever he likes, on all the roads round Boston.”

Sally Rose gave a soft little laugh. “Yes,” she said, “Gerry does that sometimes. But I like him better when he wears his scarlet coat and his sword. He’s sure handsome enough to make any girl forget about Johnny Pettengall.”

There was a prideful note in Sally Rose’s voice as she shook back her yellow hair.

“But he’s British, Sally Rose! He’s one of the King’s men who’ve captured Boston, and closed the port, and made so much trouble for the people who live there. Dick says they’ll march out and start shooting at us any day now. You’d be better off with a New England lad--even that logger.”