_Chapter Three_ TWO TO BEGIN “I told you they’d fight,” said the young man grimly, biting the end of a cartridge and letting a thin stream of black powder dribble into the pan of his flintlock. He knelt at the tail gate of the farm wagon that rattled and swayed from side to side as Sergeant Higgs of the Twenty-third drove it pell-mell down the Charlestown Road. His hat was gone and his red coat in tatters. His white breeches were stained with gunpowder and the blood of the wounded men who lay on the floor of the wagon; stained, too, with the gray earth of this unfamiliar country, so unlike the ruddy loam of his native Devonshire. “I told you they’d fight,” he repeated. “I been amongst ’em, and I know.” Nobody answered him, but he heard the roar of musket fire back in the hills, the roar of flames from a burning house in a grove of crooked trees a few yards away. He thought impatiently that it had never taken him so long to load before. “Shut your pan. Charge with your cartridge. Draw your hammer,” he muttered, as his fingers moved swiftly along the reeking barrel. No old hand at this business of soldiering, he felt reassured to find the phrases of the British Arms Manual fall so readily from his tongue. The cart rocked and rumbled down a narrow track at the edge of the salt marshes. Moors, clay pits, and scrubby oak trees stretched to the foot of the hillside on his left. To his right, in the middle of the river, he could see the lights on board the man-o’-war _Somerset_, and beyond them, the low roofs and steeples of Boston. Would he ever present arms on Boston Common again, or offer his own arms in another sort of way to the pretty girls who went walking there? He began to doubt it now. “Run down your cartridge. Withdraw your rammer.” He was ready at last. He lifted the gun and pointed it horizontally, pointed it, pulled the ten-pound trigger, and at the same instant stiffened his body against the powerful recoil. Then he heard a triumphant roar as the gun went off, sending its charge of powder and ball in the direction of the pursuing Yankees. Hooray! Sometimes it merely sparked and fizzled in the pan. God send he had hit somebody! “The Yankees don’t fire like that, lad,” he heard a voice mutter. Turning his head in surprise, he looked down at a battered veteran who crouched a few feet away, dabbing at a shoulder wound. “What do you mean?” he demanded. There wasn’t enough of the man’s uniform left to tell whether he was an officer or not. Best be safe and address him so. His voice had a ring of authority, for all it came so weakly from his throat. “I know.” The older man smiled through bluish lips. “You fire as you were taught, and so do I. Did you ever engage with the Rebels before?” “Not exactly, sir,” said Gerry Malory of the Twenty-third. “I’ve gone amongst them somewhat--‘incognito,’ one might say.” “Ah! Detailed for spy duty, perhaps?” Gerry felt his face flush. I talk too much, he thought.