“They told me I was a fool,” panted Gerry. “Told me no surgeon would come out this far to save one man, or three, or four, when so many lies bleeding there in the town. How is the Captain? Jack--where is your coat?” Sergeant Higgs motioned toward a dark heap under the locust tree. For a moment he stood silent, then he spoke. “Surgeons couldn’t ha’ saved him, Gerry--not a whole regiment of ’em marched out here two and two. When I put my hand to him, his flesh was already cold. He was about gone. I knew they wouldn’t come. I only sent you to get you away. You never been in battle, never seen men die before.” “Your coat--?” faltered Gerry. Not that the coat mattered, but he felt he could not talk of anything that did. “I laid it across his face,” said Higgs, clearing his throat. “Afterwards. It seemed more decent-like, somehow.” Gerry sat down on the grass beside the little fire, there being nothing else to do. The moon had risen and was shining wanly down on the hills and pastures, on the roofs of Charlestown village. It made a path of silver across the black bay, a path to the lighted shores of Boston. Lanterns flashed in the midst of it, lanterns on the prows of the boats that were carrying the badly defeated British back to the town they had left so proudly the night before. Gerry thought how he himself and the rest of the Twenty-third had marched out that morning, fifers playing “Yankee Doodle,” and colors lifting on the spring wind. They had marched inland by way of the Neck, through Roxbury to Cambridge, and so far, it was all a game. But the sport ceased near Lexington where they met their fleeing comrades who had gone to Concord to raid the Yankees’ powder magazine. Powerful grenadiers dropped exhausted and lay like dogs after a hunt, panting, their tongues hanging out. The Marines and Light Infantry scattered helter-skelter across the countryside, while the farmers fired at them from behind every wall and tree. “Cover the retreat,” his regiment had been ordered, and they had done so, in a running battle all the way back to Cambridge. It was there that an officer had detailed him and his sergeant to help get the wounded away.