It seemed to the two girls that the morning would last forever, as the sun toiled upward toward noon. Sally Rose ground at the windlass and swung the heavy buckets over the stone curb where Kitty’s hand received them and carried them inside. Round and round, back and forth, round and round, less like women of flesh and blood than like two parts of some wooden machine. They did not talk much together. They had not the breath for it, nor very much to say. Now and then Kitty looked up the hill to the earthworks, the tiny, gallant redoubt. The men were still toiling to reinforce it, and a man in a blue coat strolled fearlessly along the parapet as if he were telling them what to do. It was about noon by the kitchen clock when Gran came down stairs. Her face was grim. “Girls,” she said tensely, “leave your work and come with me. I want you to see a shameful sight. I want you to see the King’s soldiers coming out with guns against the King’s loyal people.” The Bay and Beagle was a square-built house of red brick, three stories tall, with a white railing about its flat roof. Gran led the girls to the side facing Boston, half a mile away. Kitty gripped the rail with both hands, though she would have liked to put them in her ears, the cannonading had become so much louder, the spaces between the blasts so brief and few. Sunlight sparkled on the blue river and on the three great ships pouring forth constant broadsides of fire. Flames leaped forth from Copp’s Hill, from floating batteries in the ferry way, and over all hung a mist of grayish white smoke. “Look there,” hissed Gran during a quiet interval, quiet except for the jangling bells of Boston that were doing their best to make their steeples rock. Kitty and Sally Rose let their glances follow her pointing finger, to the docks that lined the opposite shore. Two lines of barges were moving out on the full tide, one from Long Wharf, and one from the North Battery. They rode low in the water, being full to the gunwhales with soldiers clad in white and vivid scarlet. The sunlight gleamed on the steel of bayonets, on the brass mountings of the great black guns. It was a gorgeous and yet a terrible sight. All Boston seemed to go mad with the frantic clamor of bells. Shouts and cheers rose from its crooked streets that wandered up hill and down, and somewhere a band was playing. Its rooftops were black with tiny figures who had climbed there to watch the King’s troops move against the King’s people who felt they had always been loyal to him--so far. When the two rows of barges reached midstream they drew near to each other and then moved forward in two long lines, side by side, like pairs of marching men. They seemed to be headed for Moulton’s Point. Kitty watched them till they passed out of sight around a curve of the shore. Then she turned to face Gran and Sally Rose. “Do--do you think they’re going to land?” she asked.