At about eleven o'clock the men were ordered to cease work on the entrenchments, and their tools were piled in the rear. General Putnam now rode up, evidently from Cambridge, and had some discussion with Prescott, and, apparently as a result thereof, a large party took up the tools and started off towards Charlestown Neck. Some of this party stopped at the next hill, to which Putnam rode, and there they began to throw up breastworks under his orders. Thus the morning passed, in tedious expectancy. The burning noon found Dick and Tom again at the parapet, which was now manned with waiting musket-men. Dick's wandering gaze rested on two war-ships that were moving up the river towards those already firing. "Begorra, there's a thing or two doing, yonder in the town," said MacAlister, with a slight revival from a tone of languor. Dick looked across to Boston. Through some streets and towards the wharves, trailed a long, wide line of scarlet, flashing at countless points where the sunlight fell on polished metal. The line was of British regiments, doubtless coming to attack the Yankee redoubt. An oppressive silence fell for a moment on Dick and all his comrades, while their eyes glistened; then, simultaneously, they raised a wild, half hysterical cheer, and many a man grasped his weapon tighter, and sent towards the scarlet line afar an unconscious smile of defiant welcome. The thunder of the British batteries and ships all at once swelled to tremendous volume. The fields by the river, below the redoubt, were deluged with cannon-shot. "To hinder us frae ganging doon to stop their landing," explained MacAlister to Dick. Scarlet troops could be seen moving in Boston towards different wharves, from which at last they crowded into barges, a few of them hauling field-pieces along with them. Dick thrilled at the fine sight when the barges were rowed out into the river and towards a point of land eastward from the hill on which the Yankee army waited. Passing between the belching vessels and the river's mouth, and as the wind drove the cannon smoke westward, the barges with their loads of scarlet and steel stood out clear in the sunlight. It was one o'clock when the barges huddled together at the point, and the red-coated troops filed ashore, and began to form in lines, now on the same side of the river with the colonials who had defied them. Dick admired the precision of the three lines in which they formed, the patience with which they waited while their officers consulted and while the barges went back apparently for more troops, the matter-of-fact manner in which many of them ate their dinners while they stood.