[Illustration] TRIAL BY FIRE By Ernest Haycox Doctor Brent was up early that morning on a call to the widow Potter’s, a mile or so down the road from his own house. In fact a very frightened young Potter grandson had come a-tapping on his door quite before dawn and brought him back to the fevered old lady. The doctor exercised his skill, waited for a more favorable sign from the patient and then, near breakfast, got upon his horse and returned slowly toward his own hearth, meditating a little upon the wonderful vitality of these simple-living New England people. The day promised to be hot. There was in the air that forecast of sultriness not uncommon to June weather, and over in the direction of Boston town the sun hovered below the sea’s edge, striking upward with its blood-red rays. The doctor, rubbing his ruddy cheeks, wondered how Gage and his soldiers enjoyed their forced idleness in the town. His professional instinct led him to emit a small cluck of pity. “Poor ----,” he murmured, bending in the saddle, “they’ll be sadly needing fresh foods. I doubt not there’s much scurvy and camp disease among them.” Well, he mused, it was a great deal Gage’s own fault. He had permitted himself to be cooped up and surrounded by a half-organized patriot army. The doctor, whose opinions were staunchly Tory, frowned. He had thought this was going to be a stalemate and that after a time the farmers, collecting their better senses and cooling their rage following the affair of Lexington and Concord, would disperse and go back to their occupations. It was not so. Old Artemas Ward commanded an army of sixteen thousand men, stretched from Charlestown Neck to Dorchester way. And night before last there had been whisperings of a sortie against the British. The air seemed to have grown more charged with desperate possibilities in the forty-eight hours elapsing. It was murmured, too, that the Committee of Safety had come to a bold decision and had given Ward his moving orders. But where and when? From Medford to Roxbury the countryside was in a ferment of anticipation, and the tag ends of rumors and fears came back to the doctor in a most tantalizing and distressing form. The horse quickened his pace. The doctor emerged from his thoughts and raised his head to perceive a strange sight along the road. It had grown quite light now, and the sun’s top quarter was above the horizon. Ahead of him in the road, raising the dust as they traveled, advanced a group of men. Not in formation, but in ones and twos and small parties; stringing along at greater and lesser intervals as far as the winding highway could be viewed. The doctor’s surprised eyes counted perhaps two score such, and momentarily he noted others straggling out of the farmhouses by the wayside, all setting their faces in the common direction.