tourniquet and how to care for a broken leg. But the Boy Scout manual didn't say anything about people with blood coming out of their stomach or their mouth. The pictures just showed a well-built handsome man in a white shirt with his sleeves rolled up lying down in a sort of neat way, with a very calm Boy Scout kneeling neatly beside him, winding bandages around his arms or legs or putting on a splint. The man in the pictures didn't look up at the Boy Scout with horrible eyes and bubble blood at him. Panic-stricken, Arthur knelt down like the Scout in the picture and wondered what to do. Should he turn the man so that his head was higher or lower than his feet? Which, higher or lower? Or apply a tourniquet? But where? You couldn't put a tourniquet on a person if their stomach was bleeding, could you?
'Musket...' gurgled the man at him. He triea to say something else.
'I beg your pardon?' said Arthur, politely bowing closer. The man struggled to speak, with the blood coming up in gushes. He choked, and went into a sort of spasm. Arthur, horrified, could think of nothing to do but unknot his kerchief and use it to wipe at the man's mouth, so that he could speak better. But the man's strugglings ceased. He rolled his head to one side and lay still. Arthur got to his feet and ran. There was a house at the left of the walk to the bridge. He ran and pounded at the door and rang the bell. He started yelling, 'Help, get a doctor, help!' There were people walking on Monument Street, a woman pushing a baby carriage. There was a bus unloading passengers over in the parking lot. A bunch of men in ten-gallon hats and cowboy boots were getting out. A policeman was talking to the driver. Arthur jumped off the porch of the house and ran across the road. 'Help!' he said. 'There's a man dying back there, get a doctor!'
Everyone turned to look at him. The policeman started to run toward him. 'Where, sonny?' he said.
*15*
There was an old woman walking along Liberty Street, carrying a basket with a pink balloon tied to it. It was the Gosses' housekeeper-cook, Mrs. Bewley, ambling home from the celebration. She had swiped the balloon nimbly from the balloon-man, but all the rest she had scavenged perfectly honestly: the half-pack of cigarettes, the three popsicle sticks, the wing from the plastic airplane, the nickel, the button, and, of course, innumerable messages from Jesus. She didn't know what Jesus said, since she could neither read nor write, but sooner or later she would get someone to shout it in her ear. Those yellow ones probably said Juicy Fruit. It had something to do with the Garden of Eden.
It would be such fun to add all these new things to her collection! It had been a grand morning. Mrs. Bewley looked down proudly at her dress and smiled. The dress was over thirty years old, but it was brand new to Mrs. Bewley. It had started its long and useful life as a second-hand article in 1932 when it was displayed for the first time in the Girl Scout Rummage Sale. Over the next ten years it had been handed down and sold and resold at the same sale, and then it had taken a new lease on life during a Clothe the Naked campaign conducted by the Evangelical Free Church. Sent to the remotest reaches of the Himalayas the dress that now belonged to Mrs. Bewley had become a part of the ceremonial wardrobe of a succession of tribal chieftains—until around 1950, when a resourceful chieftain with a large wardrobe and a flat tire traded it for a bicycle pump and a yak's hair fetish to the native lady's maid of a missionary's wife. Years later it went along with the lady's maid and the missionary's wife and the missionary all the way back to Boston for an Evangelical Congress, and then it found its way back at last to the Concord Girl Scout Rummage Sale (the lady's maid had discovered Filene's Basement). At the Rummage Sale it was clawed off the rack by an eager Mrs. Bewley, who couldn't fail to notice how much the buttons down the front resembled the beady brown eyes of her squirrel neckpiece. There were squirrels, definitely, running around inside Mrs. Bewley's head. But her eyes were as sharp and scavenging as ever. They saw something lying on the ground across the field, something that looked out of place. Out of place, hopeful and lost, as if it didn't belong to a solitary human soul. Of course if anybody should happen to come to Mrs. Bewley and ask for it she would be very glad indeed to give it right back. Mrs. Bewley scrambled over the stone wall and scuttled down the sloping field...
*16*
One of the tourists from Texas had longer legs than Patrolman Vine. He brushed past him and bounded down the path. 'I'm a doctor,' he hollered over his shoulder. Ralph Chope was the representative of a floor machinery company in Houston, but he had been a medical corpsman in the Korean War, and if there was one thing he knew how to do in the medical line, it was tell if a poor devil was dead or not. By the time Patrolman Vine came pounding up, Chope had administered his tests on the body, and had rolled it over and was groping with his fingers in the wound.
'Is he dead?'
'He sure is. Jeez, look at that. The ball went all the way through him and out the other side, almost.' The Texan held up something between two fingers. 'Looky here. That's a regular old-fashioned musket ball. Say, this sure is some show you're puttin' on here.'
Patrolman Vine didn't think that was funny. He took the musket ball and looked at it, then wrapped it up in a clean handkerchief and put it in his pocket. He stared at the corpse, then wheeled and looked sharply at a growing audience of Texas tourists, the bus driver and the woman with the baby carriage.
*17*
Letitia Jellicoe, acting as a substitute guide for the holiday in the Old Manse, had arrived with a young couple at the upstairs room which both Emerson and Hawthorne had used as a study. She pointed to the window that looked down toward the bridge and started her spiel. 'You will see written on the glass with Mrs. Hawthorne's diamond the words
'That's Ernest Goss, isn't it?' she said sharply. 'Did somebody...?'
Arthur Furry spoke up then, with the information that was trembling on his lips. 'It was Paul Revere. I mean, you know, not Paul Revere but that other one, that rides up in the parade. I heard a shot as I was coming up back there behind the Minuteman, and this man on a horse with a costume on, you know, and a wig, he rode almost on top of me, jumping over the fence...'
Everybody stared at Arthur. 'And he-he said 'musket,' I heard him myself...'
'Who?' said Patrolman Vine. 'Who said 'musket'?'
Arthur pointed to the dead man. 'Him. He did.'
Patrolman Vine squinted at Arthur. Then he put his big hand on Arthur's arm and pulled him forward. Arthur, staring up at him respectfully, began to be aware for the first time of the glory that was to be his. But then the policeman looked away from Arthur and spoke to Mrs. Jellicoe. 'You've got a phone in there at the Old Manse? Would you get the station on the line and ask them to send some more men down here and the District Medical Examiner? Tell them there's been an accident, it looks like someone's been shot. You know the number?
