“The black flies were the worst,” complained Kitty. “I’m bitten in a dozen places, I vow. And I don’t dare scratch the bites, for if I do, I’ll look as if I had smallpox.” She thought back over their long day’s riding: village greens with white steeples--Wenham, Beverly, Salem; long stretches of salt marsh with the sea beyond it; then Lynn and Malden, as the towns drew closer in. It was already night when they came to Medford, and there a constable had ridden with them through town, straight to the Penny Ferry. Part of the great New England Army was camped on the hills about and overflowing the streets and taverns, he said, and he feared for the safety of young maids abroad so late. What were their folks thinking of, anyway? For once Sally Rose had been too tired to be charming. She bowed her head meekly and accepted his rebuke. But her spirits rose as they left river and causeway behind them and took a field path so as not to have to pass the Sign of the Sun tavern where there were apt to be British officers about. “My, but Daddy will be surprised,” she said. “I want a glass of Spanish wine and a meat pasty. And then, bed! Oh Kitty, think what it’ll be like to have a featherbed under us again! I swear, I’ll roll and wallow in it! Why--why here we are, and there aren’t any lights in the windows!” They drew up their horses uncertainly in the deserted street. All the houses were dark around them, and the cloudy sky was dark overhead. A lantern burned at the top of a pole a little way off, so that Kitty could make out the weathered sign before her uncle’s tavern, the wooden profile of a tall bay horse pawing the air, and at his feet a trim, alert hunting dog. But as Sally Rose said, the diamond-shaped panes were dark. Peering closer, however, she noticed some letters traced in whitewash on the iron-bound door. “Look, Sally Rose, there’s a sign, but I can’t read it,” she said. They got down from their horses and walked closer. “Neither can I,” said Sally Rose. She tried the door. It was locked tight. “I know how to climb in by the buttery window,” she murmured, for once a little crestfallen, “but I still want to know what is written on the door. I wonder where Father can be. He always keeps late closing time.” She stood irresolute a moment. Then she drew a quick breath as if something pleased her, and ran down the street to the lantern swinging on its pole. Reaching, stretching, pulling herself up, she managed to lift it down and hurry back, holding it proudly aloft, flashing it on the paneled door. In the light that flared uncertainly behind the thin panes of horn, the two cousins bent close and read aloud the words, “Closed. Gone to the wars till the damn British be beat. J. Townsend.”