The taproom they entered was not unlike the taproom at the Bay and Beagle, but tables and benches had been moved back to clear the floor. Some dozen men in tattered shirts and bloody breeches were lying on the wide pine boards. Some moaned, and some lay very still. Three women worked among them, and a man in a buff coat, a doctor, most like, knelt by one soldier probing a wounded knee. Gran looked around her. “There’s water and bandages on the counter over there,” she said. “Get to work, Kitty, Sally Rose.” If the morning had seemed long, it seemed that that afternoon at the Sign of the Sun would never go. Kitty knelt and swabbed and tied bandages and held whiskey to men’s lips to ease their pain when Dr. Eustis’ probe went deep. Sally Rose and Gran were doing the same thing, too. Then the men came in so fast there was no room for them in the tavern, so they were laid in the yard, and all about the garden reaching up the hill. The air was full of booming sound and smoke, and over all burned the hot, hot sun. The British had charged the Hill and been driven back, she heard from the men she tended. The British had gathered themselves together and were about to charge again. She and Gran and Sally Rose were working over two men with shoulder wounds, trying to staunch the flow of blood, when Gran suddenly stood up and put her hand to her forehead. A strange look came across her face. Then she smiled, and the light in her eyes paled out and dimmed away. “The young may die,” she murmured, “but the old must.” She tottered and fell beside the soldiers on the bloody grass. “Dead. Stone dead,” muttered Dr. Eustis, kneeling above her a few moments later. “Her heart failed from the shock and strain of this day, I do believe. But she died with her hand to the plow. She died like a good soldier.” Sally Rose crouched on the steps of the tavern, put her head in her lap, and burst into uncontrollable weeping. She never moved from there the rest of the afternoon. After Gran’s body was carried to a chamber over the taproom, Kitty looked desolately about her for a few moments. Then she went back to tending the wounded men. She would do what it was needful for her to do. Word came down the hill that the British were driving on the redoubt, that powder horns were getting low. Sometime after that--she never knew how long--Kitty knelt beside the newest soldier to arrive. His head was bloody, and he wore a rough shirt and breeches like all the rest, but on his feet were the fine polished boots worn by the men in the British Army. When she washed the blood away, she found she was bending over Gerry Malory. _Chapter Fifteen_ A TERRIBLE BLACK DAY “We be going down this hill now,” said Colonel John Stark, “to fortify and hold the rail fence there.”