Nance, bewildered and numb with terror, tried to follow out Granny’s instructions. Back in the kitchen she fumbled through the bin, brought out a sack of potatoes, and stood there helplessly, holding it. Gran reached past her. “Take the apples, instead,” she advised. “They’ll taste better if we have to eat them raw.” Finally the young wife got herself, the two children, and the shawl-wrapped infant into the wagon. She sat on the seat with Granny, and Kitty and Sally Rose crouched on a sack of turnips a farmer had given them early in the afternoon. How long ago that seemed! In the gathering twilight they drove swiftly along the winding river road. The lower Merrimack Valley above the Port was not sparsely settled country in those spring days of 1775. There were farmhouses and parish churches and crossroads villages scattered all about it, and few dwellers there who could not see their neighbor’s chimney smoke or the lights of his kitchen when they looked out at night. But now the peaceful district was overrun with strangers and refugees streaming through. Kitty and Sally Rose huddled together on the turnip sack for warmth, looking back down the road every now and then, to see if the British were in sight, if the glare of burning towns lighted the sky. But all they could see were the frightened folk of Essex County hurrying for the swamps and the forests, for the low hills of New Hampshire Colony across the wide dark stream. Women, and a few old or feeble men, were toiling across the farmyards here and there, carrying favorite gowns, or chests of silver, or pewter teapots to conceal them in wells and hollow trees. And from almost every doorstep strong arms laboriously hoisted old folk and invalids into carts to haul them away. “What do you think’ll come of it, Kit?” asked Sally Rose in a low worried voice. “Do you think Gran will take us over the river to Haverhill? I don’t want to go to Haverhill. It’s a sleepy country town, and it’ll be worse than the Port, with all the lads away. I’d almost rather get caught by the British, I think.” “But they’re cutting and slashing all before them,” Kitty reminded her grimly. “That farmer said he rode over twenty dead bodies on the way.” “Well, I do not think they would cut and slash me,” said Sally Rose, smiling confidently in the dark. “Oh, Kit, look there!” They were passing a tiny cottage half hidden by leafy apple trees. An armchair had been placed firmly on a scrap of lawn, and in the chair sat a man with a lantern beside him and a musket across his knees. He was enormous, and almost perfectly round. “Let the British come!” he shouted, and waved his musket. “I be too fat to budge for ’em! I’ll stay here and shoot the bloody devils down!”