“I wisht,” muttered Timothy, “I had displayed less incautious valor with that brandy keg. In God’s mercy, I do, sir.” Dr. Warren tightened the last bandage and got to his feet. “Take him up carefully, lads,” he said, “and carry him above stairs. The little golden-head will show you where.” Kitty thought fleetingly that even the great doctor had been enough like common men so that he had an eye for the beauty of Sally Rose. She had hardly noticed what he said about a battle on Bunker Hill. But she thought about it later when she was standing at the tavern door in the hot dusk, looking past the roofs of Charlestown at the green countryside rising behind it. Gran was at home now, alternately tending Timothy and scolding Sally Rose. The doctor and the soldiers had long since gone, and the exchange of prisoners was probably complete. Bunker Hill rose smooth and round and green. Breed’s Hill, not so tall, was nearer the point, and the third hill, away to the southeast, she could not see. The hills were criss-crossed with rail fences and stone walls, divided into orchards, gardens, and pasture land. Daisies and buttercups bloomed all white and gold in the hayfields. The locust trees rose tall, and the elm trees taller. Hard green fruit clung to the apple boughs, and tassels were coming on the stalks of Indian corn. Gulls cried from the harbor, and a bat swooped down from the eaves above her head, and darted off, winging its way from side to side of the crooked street. Away to the eastward a low-lying cloud bank merged with the dim sea. There were clouds in the west, too, and thickening round the hills and steeples of Boston. But over Bunker Hill the sky was clear, lighted with one pale star. She took it to be a good omen--that there would be no battle there. It seemed to Kitty the most peaceful landscape she had ever seen in her life. And yet, the talk was, “Fortify Bunker Hill! Make a stand against the British there!” She was glad Dr. Warren did not favor it, and she hoped he would have his way. She thought maybe she would have liked the young man by the prisoners’ cart, if she had ever come to know him. But then, she had never dreamed that he was not an American. And he had turned out to be her cousin’s British Gerry. He probably wouldn’t have looked so handsome to her if he had been wearing his red coat. _Chapter Ten_ A TRYST WITH THE ENEMY “But what makes you so sure he will be there, Sally Rose,” asked Kitty, “if you haven’t had any word?” She was curled up in the middle of the four-poster bed which she shared with her cousin. Sally Rose sat at the dressing table. A candle burned at each side of the mirror, and she was studying her reflection in its glass. She wore nothing but a thin cambric shift, and her feet were bare. “He told me he would come in a week’s time, if not before. He promised it wouldn’t be more than that. When he got aboard the boat to go to the _Lively_, he promised me.”