“Sakes alive, child,” answered Gran, “I don’t know what they mean to do, but we’ll go back downstairs and see if we can find out. There are sure to be more men coming after water.” She glanced up the hill toward the redoubt. Only a few figures moved about it now, but clouds of dust rose everywhere, thrown up by the impact of cannon balls, and the smoke from the guns themselves drifted that way. At that moment a handful of men appeared on the top of Bunker Hill, coming from the direction of the Neck. More men followed them, and still more. In orderly fashion they marched toward the redoubt where they were greeted with a faint cheering. “Looks like more of our lads had come to help,” said Gran, as she led them down the narrow stairs and into the taproom. Just as she had suspected, three water carriers waited there, and all the pails and tubs were empty. “Gran,” whispered Sally Rose, “I--I just don’t think I can turn that windlass any more.” Gran looked at her keenly. “It makes the arms ache, I know,” she said with surprising sympathy. “Kitty, you go to the well for a while, and let Sally Rose carry the buckets.” And thus their morning chores began all over again, though it was already early afternoon. At the end of her third trip between well and taproom, Sally Rose stopped to talk to Kitty in one of the rare intervals when no gun was going off. “Kit,” she said wanly, “I--I’m frightened, Kit. Do you think Gerry’s coming in one of those barges? Do you think he’ll have to shoot at our lads on the Hill? Do you think he might shoot at me?” Kitty had been wondering almost the same thing, but she would not tell her cousin so. “If you’re going to think about a lad at a time like this,” she said, “why don’t you think of Johnny? You’ve gone about with Johnny for a long time, Sally Rose, and Johnny’s on our side. Don’t you wonder if maybe he isn’t up there--in that earthworks on the Hill? Right there in the thick of the cannon balls?” “Well, I do wonder about Johnny,” she answered plaintively, “and about Dick, even about that New Hampshire boy with no manners--Tom what’s his name.” Kitty, too, had wondered about Tom, but not too much. There was a cold certainty in her heart that Tom Trask would be in the thick of whatever fighting there was to come. She knew that as well as if she could see him there. “Girls!” called Gran’s voice from the kitchen door. “Girls! come here to me!” Kitty let go the windlass suddenly, and the handle spun creaking round. Sally Rose set down her pail. Just then there was a loud whine somewhere overhead, and then a whoosh, a shower of splinters about them, and a roaring wind that flung them hard against the turf. For a moment they lay there, not daring to move. The smell of burning powder filled the air. Then another roaring wind went by, but not so close, and higher overhead.