Tom Trask stood up. He held the old gun lightly in his hand. “Your most needful tool is there,” he said, “but you don’t know enough to know it. Put the boot on the last, you should have. That would ha’ held it firm, and left your hands free to get on with your cobbling. Right enough, we’ll go to Cambridge, and we’ll take you along as our prisoner, Captain Malory o’ the Twenty-third. All the world can see you’re no shoemaker. Johnny Stark will know what to do with you. Landlord, have you a length of rope, or better, a few links of chain, about the place? For safety, we’ll tie him up now.” Gerry Malory, of Barnstaple in English Devon, bit his lip and stared around him somewhat wildly. That cursed Yankee with the gun that looked as if it came out of Noah’s ark stood between him and the open doorway. He doubted if it would shoot, but even if it didn’t, its owner looked like no easy man to handle. And the Yankee had his friends about him. While he hesitated, two old men ambled forward and bound his wrists together with a heavy length of clanking chain. Then they stepped back, and the whole company continued to stare at him. “Captain,” said Tom Trask thoughtfully, “I be not so sure as I was that you come this way to see a girl. Likely you did, but likely, too, you might ha’ spread the false report that the British was upon us. It might ha’ been a word o’ yours that sent us flying over hills far and wide as if the devil was after. A fool’s prank, maybe--maybe a smart trick to spread confusion amongst us.” Suddenly Gerry Malory remembered the scenes of the afternoon: lean spinsters rocking along like giraffes in the animal garden on Tower Hill, fat men waddling off, their faces red and their eyes popping with panic. He laughed aloud and looked down at his hands bound stiffly in front of him. “In either case, it was fun while it lasted,” he said. _Chapter Seven_ OFF TO THE WARS IN BOSTON “Cousin, I see no future for us in this place,” said Sally Rose bleakly. She was sitting in the soft grass on the hill behind the Frog Pond, looking down the dusty street that led through the Port, straight to the wharves and warehouses along the river. Kitty pulled herself up on her elbow and let her glance follow her cousin’s. There appeared to be as many white sails in the channel as usual, the same blue spring haze on the far shore, and the familiar curve of sky overhead. But the town below them, commonly bustling with life on a warm May afternoon, looked strangely deserted and still. A brown dog slept in the middle of High Street, and two old men hobbled past the Wolfe Tavern in the direction of Market Square. A farm cart ground its slow way towards Old Newbury, and a group of children ran hither and thither across the training green with laughter and shrill cries.