Johnny Tremain (33 page)

B
Y INSIGNIFICANT
back alleys and little-trod lanes, Johnny made his way to the ferry slip in North Boston. From there to Charlestown boats were going back and forth. The wounded were taken off first.

No civilian except only the Boston doctors, who had offered their services, were allowed close to the wharf. It was well Johnny had thought to put on Pumpkin's uniform. Mrs. Bessie had been right about one thing. A Yankee caught impersonating a British soldier would be shot. He kept well out of the moonlight and away from the flare of torches, and huddled between a warehouse and a tanning shed.

His uniform said he was a private in the Fourth Regiment—the King's Own. Pumpkin had not been big and bold enough for a grenadier nor clever enough for a light infantryman. Just a simple footsoldier. Obviously, a footsoldier of the Fourth would have left Boston that morning with Percy, would have mucked about for twelve hours shooting and being shot at. And he would not already be back in Boston unless he had been wounded. The smartness of the uniform which at first had delighted him he now saw was a danger. He lay down and rolled in the muck of the tanning shed. Tore his jacket on a nail and pulled off a button. The black and silver hat he stamped on, banged out of shape, and pulled on well over his eyes. He put mud on his face; pricked his wrist, and smeared his cheek with blood. Then he stepped out on the wharf.

An officer who had been in town all day moved up to him. Johnny saluted.

'Wounded?'

'Not much, sir.'

'Well, better report to the medical officers. They are using that house as a temporary hospital.'

'Others are worse off than I. I'll wait till the bad ones have been tended to.'

'That's the spirit. How was the fighting?'

'Very heavy, sir.'

'Can those damned Yankees shoot straight?'

Johnny had been around the regulars enough to know that was a question that should be answered by oaths (in spite of Mr. Lapham's training).

The officer laughed and moved down the wharf.

Although no townsmen, except only the doctors, were permitted on the wharf, Johnny knew that hundreds of them stood well back and in darkness, gloating. They were not saying much, only watching. Then one man began to whistle and the next took it up and the next and the next. The whistling was shrill as a fife. They had not forgotten the prophecy of that morning, 'They go out by "Yankee Doodle," but they'll dance to it before nightfall!'

'Yankee Doodle' filled the darkness as the eerie shrilling of the hylas fill black swamps in spring.

Four more boats were coming in. Johnny dared move out onto the wharf, but he still kept well in shadow. More wounded. Could these be the very men who had started out so confidently? Bedraggled, dirty, torn uniforms, torn flesh, lost equipment. Faces ghastly with fatigue and pain. Some were twisting and crying out. The first two boats were filled with privates. They had been packed in, and now were being tossed ashore, like so much cordwood. Most of them were pathetically good and patient, but he saw an officer strike a man who was screaming.

Johnny's hands clenched. 'It is just as James Otis said,' he thought. 'We are fighting, partly, for just that. Because a man is a private is no reason he should be treated like cordwood.'

The third boat was moving in with a creak of oarlocks and he heard an exclamation, 'Colonel Smith.' There were only two wounded in this boat, for both were officers. Getting the fat colonel up and off the bottom of the dory was heavy work. He was rolled upon a stretcher and carried to the hospital. He had been shot through the leg. Johnny had never seen Colonel Smith except when he was rosy with good brandy, pompous with pride in himself and the men he commanded. Now he was tallow-colored and as deflated as a pricked bladder.

The other officer crawled off unaided. The torch suddenly lighted his face. A dark young face, his lips locked to keep down any cry of pain. One arm in a bloody sling. Rab—oh, Rab ... Of course not. It was Lieutenant Stranger.

Instinctively Johnny started forward to help him, for everyone else was so busy with the wounded colonel, Stranger was left to shift for himself. The boy thought in time of his own danger. How curious a thing is war! Last week—no, yesterday—this man was, in a way, his friend. Lieutenant Stranger walked stiffly and in agony toward the hospital.

And then another boat, more wounded. The sight of them sickened Johnny. Gray and twisted lips. Hollow eyes. 'But I can't leave ... I've got to stay about, watch my chance for a ride over.'

Next what was left of Colonel Smith's command began to arrive. They had been marching, and much of the time under fire, for twenty-four hours. They had gone without food or water. As the men stumbled off the boats, there were plenty of questions and answers. Johnny would not be able to tell Doctor Warren the exact number of casualties the British had suffered, but he could tell him that they thought they were heavy.

The very last man of Colonel Smith's command to return was Major Pitcairn. His face still looked cheerful and confident. They had been licked, had they? All right. The tough old marine had been licked before. As he stepped ashore, suddenly the soldiers about the ferry slip began to cheer. 'Let's get back at 'em, Major,' they yelled.

He grinned and stuck out his jaw. 'We'll take another try,' he said, 'and if next time we don't clean up on those...' he went off into the profanity for which he was famous to describe what he thought of their enemies, and a roar went up from the men.

Now Johnny learned that the bulk of Percy's Brigade would be left over in Charlestown camped on Bunker Hill until the next morning. Johnny believed the time had come for him to act.

The sailors from one of the boats were standing about arguing whether or not they were supposed to go to the
Somerset
for the night, or over to Charlestown. Johnny ran up to them. 'I've a message for Earl Percy.' He was breathing hard from excitement, but it might have come from running. 'Get me over quick, boys.'

'Oh, you go whistle for your general,' said one of them. 'You go whistle for your mama. We're sailors, not soldiers, see?'

'Just let me take your boat...'

'That's irregular.'

'Well, I've got to get over and I can't swim, can I?'

'You ask Lieutenant Swift. He's in charge of us.'

The last thing Johnny wanted was to be questioned by an officer.

'Will you or won't you take me across?'

'Not without orders—you little wabbler.'

'What's up, men?' a quiet voice asked. The sailors saluted.

'This here baby-boy says he's got a message for Earl Percy. He wants us to row him over.'

'Then you will do so.'

'Aye, aye, sir.'

Nobody had asked to see Johnny's letter.

Johnny was rowed across and landed at a wharf in Charlestown. Quickly he slipped up a cobbled street, turned into a garden, stripped off his uniform and hung it on a clothesline. He found a pump and washed his face.

Although past midnight lights showed in all but the abandoned houses. The people of Charlestown were in a panic. They dared not go to bed with over a thousand British soldiers suddenly camped upon them—defeated soldiers whose mood might turn ugly. These soldiers only wanted to be let alone, allowed to sleep, but the inhabitants thought they might butcher them all.

Johnny glanced in at two or three taverns. British officers were sleeping in chairs, on benches, on the floors, but he remembered that one of the tavern-keepers was a prominent Son of Liberty. There he tiptoed in among the sleeping guests, found a nine-year-old girl servant hidden behind a flour barrel in the pantry and got her to lead him to the summer house where the tavern-keeper and his wife had moved for the night.

From the tavern-keeper he learned for the first time what had happened after the skirmish at Lexington. Colonel Smith had indeed marched on to Concord, possessed the town, destroyed such military stores as had not yet been hidden. And there had been another skirmish. You might even call it a battle, at North Bridge.

But from everywhere, all about, had come the Minute Men. Obviously Smith had been a little afraid of leaving the safety of the village. He would wait where he was for the reinforcements he had sent for, even before Lexington.

But Percy did not come and did not come. Every moment more and more Minute Men were arriving, surrounding the village. At noon Smith had decided to try to take his men back. He dared wait no longer. Then the shooting began. The Minute Men, from behind stone walls and barns, trees, bushes, had opened fire. Beaten and bloody, almost in a panic, Colonel Smith's troops struggled through to Lexington. Not until then did Percy's reserves arrive. If they had not come, every one of Smith's command would have been killed.

And from Lexington the British had drawn back to Menotomy. And from there the wounded scarlet dragon had crawled over Charlestown Common, crossed into safety at Charlestown Neck, and were covered by the
Somerset's
guns. And here they were. They had been badly beaten.

'What of Doctor Warren?'

He had been everywhere, one moment fighting and dressing the wounds the next. He had fought like a wildcat. But the innkeeper had no idea where he was now.

'He didn't get hurt?'

'I'm told he had a lock of hair shot away. He came that close to death.'

'Have you, by any chance, heard how it fared with the men of Lexington?'

'I believe seven or eight of them were killed in that first volley.'

'Do you know their names?'

'No. But by the time the British got back to Lexington from Concord, the Lexington men were ready for them. And they fit 'em and harried 'em all the way to Charlestown.'

Johnny knew he had no chance of leaving Charlestown until the few hundred fresh men who had been rowed over to hold the Neck had been withdrawn. Next morning he watched them go and waited his chance. It was ten o'clock when he left the town. People were running about. Each had a story to tell. Many women, children, and timid folk had spent the night hidden in the clay pits. They, too, were coming out of hiding.

Johnny, from sheer high spirits, jumped the now deserted breastwork the British had thrown up so hastily the night before. He had seen so much of the British army he had come half to believe that they were, even as they said, invincible. No Yankee farmers could stand up to them. He had been impressed with their perfection of equipment, discipline, grand gaudy uniforms, the pride of their officers. 'We beat them. We Yankees did. God
was
with us.'

He took the road for Cambridge, crossing desolate Charlestown Common with its salt marshes, clay pits, gallows, and gibbet. Everywhere he saw signs of the retreat: The heavy tracks of cannon. The road itself beaten to muck under anxious feet. He saw lost hats, uniforms, muskets even, and he saw a group of men getting a horse out of a pit. The horse was taking the matter sensibly, not struggling, seeming to understand that the oxen being tackled would pull him out. It was Colonel Smith's Sandy. Johnny looked upon this as a good omen and walked forward whistling, but his whistling stopped abruptly. He had met his first burial party. He noted the faces of the men and women following the dead countryman. Next he saw a cellar hole with smoke and stench still rising from it.

There was a tavern, and in the taproom men sat about drinking rum and boasting of their great deeds. Johnny did not doubt but they all had done as well as they said, but he was in no mood to listen. So, having bought bread, a handful of salt alewives, and asked if anyone knew where Doctor Warren was, he quickly left. They told him to try Cambridge.

Here a strange thing had happened apparently overnight. Milling about were hundreds upon hundreds, perhaps thousands of Minute Men. They had come as they were from the plow, the shop, even from the pulpit. Most of them had guns in their hands, but there were hardly a dozen overcoats among them. No blankets. They had no food except the little their women had tied up for them—enough to take a man through one day's fighting. No tents, no extra munitions. What now was to be done with them? What were they to do with themselves? Should they go home now—having accomplished the mission for which they had been summoned—or were they to stay and undertake the siege of Boston? They had no cannon. Seemingly they had nothing but the guns in their hands and the fire in their hearts.

A man, who told Johnny he was a colonel—he did have a pair of home-made epaulets sewed to his old hunting shirt—said that the Committee of Safety was sitting at the Hastings' house, trying to work out some way these civilians might be turned into soldiers. Doctor Warren was chairman of this committee. Johnny went to the Hastings' house, where he met Paul Revere, who told him Doctor Warren had left for Lexington.

Lexington! It was to Lexington of all places in the world Johnny wanted to go. Now he had an excuse for it. This day like the one before was warm and beautiful. It was one of those silent, dreamy spring days when sunshine pours down upon the yet-cold earth and the earth turns in its sleep. No cloud in the sky. Not one cat's-paw of breeze.