The long, wearying winter had done its worst for the prisoned inhabitants within the town; and, truly, it had tried and pinched the waiting friends who stood at the gates. At last, in March, in the night, the brave helpers climbed the hills, built on them smaller hills, and by the light of the morning were able to look over into the town--at which the patriots were glad and the British commander frightened. A little after nine of the clock on Sunday morning, the 17th of March, 1776, three Narragansett ponies stood before General Washington's headquarters at Cambridge. "Go with all possible speed to Governor Trumbull," said Washington, delivering despatches to a well-known and trusted messenger, who instantly mounted one of the ponies in waiting--Sweeping Wind by name--and rode away, with many a sharp and inquiring glance back at city and river and camp. It was four of the clock in the afternoon, and the messenger had not paused since he set forth, longer than to give Sweeping Wind water to drink, when, on the highway in the distance, he saw a red cloak fluttering and flying before him. It was Pussy Dean who wore the cloak. She was fifteen, fair and lovely, brave and patriotic as any soldier in the land. At first she was angry at the law by which she was denied a new cloak that winter, made of English fabric, but when wrapped in the coveted broadcloth of scarlet belonging to her mother she was more than reconciled. On this Sunday Pussy had been at the meeting-house on the hill, two miles from home, at both morning and afternoon service, and afterward had lingered a little to gather up bits of news from camp and town to take home to her mother, and so it had happened that she was quite alone on the highway. Pussy chanced to look back to the summit of the hill down which she had walked, and she saw the express coming. "Now," she thought, "if I could only stop him! I wonder if I can't. I'll try, and then," swinging her silken bag, "I shall have news to carry home, the very latest, too." As she swung the bag she suddenly remembered that she had something within it to offer the rider. "Of course I can," she went on saying to herself. "Post-riders are always hungry, and it's lucky for him that I didn't have to eat my dinner myself, to-day. Now, if I only had a basketful of clover heads or roses for that pony, I'd find out all about Boston while it was eating." The only roses within sight were blooming on Pussy Dean's two cheeks as Sweeping Wind came clattering his shoes against the frozen ground. He would have gone straight on had a scarlet cloak not been planted, like a fluttering standard, full in his pathway. The rider gave the pony the slightest possible check, since he felt sure that no red-coated soldier lurked behind the red cloak. "Take something to eat, won't you?" accosted Pussy, rather glowing in feature and agitated in voice by her own daring.