prisoners’ heads. The two guards laughed.
“What the hell did you do that for?” James shouted.
The sailor mouthed some response and turned away. “They put us here one hour a day,” Will Greenlaw said miserably, “and pour their slops on us.”
The tide was taking the
“You’ll be sorry when the king asks who was loyal to him!” Archibald Haney shouted angrily.
“The English treat our prisoners far worse!” Will Young bellowed from the
James had been forced onto a port tack again and the wind took him away from the sloop. Archibald Haney shouted something, but the words were lost on the breeze, all but one. Traitor.
James tacked the boat again and ran her towards the beach. He dropped her anchor, furled her mainsail, and stowed the foresails, then hailed a passing lighter to give him a dry-ride ashore. Traitor, rebel, Tory, Loyalist? If his father were still alive, he wondered, would he dare be a rebel?
He climbed the bluff, retrieved the musket from his shelter and walked south to Dyce’s Head to find Peleg Wadsworth. The sun was low now, casting a long shadow over the ridge and along the harbor’s foreshore. Wadsworth’s men were gathering in the trees where they could not be seen from the fort. “You look pensive, young James,” Wadsworth greeted him.
“I’m well enough, sir,” James said.
Wadsworth looked at him more closely. “What is it?”
“You know what they’re doing to the prisoners?” James asked, then blurted out the whole tale. “They’re my neighbors, sir,” he said, “and they called me traitor.”
Wadsworth had been listening patiently. “This is war, James,” he said gently, “and it creates passions we didn’t know we possessed.”
“They’re good men, sir!”
“And if we released them,” Wadsworth said, “they’d work for our enemies.”
“They would, yes,” James allowed.
“But that’s no reason to maltreat them,” Wadsworth said firmly, “and I’ll talk to the general, I promise,” though he knew well enough that whatever protest he made would change nothing. Men were frustrated. They wanted this expedition finished. They wanted to go home. “And you’re no traitor, James,” he said.
“No? My father would say I am.”
“Your father was British,” Wadsworth said, “and you and I were both born British, but that’s all changed now. We’re Americans.” He said the word as though he were not used to it, but felt a pang of pride because of it. And tonight, he thought, the Americans would take a small step towards their liberty. They would attack the battery.
In the dark.
The Indians joined Wadsworth’s militia after sunset. They appeared silently and, as ever, Wadsworth found their presence unsettling. He could not lose the impression that the dark-skinned warriors judged him and found him wanting, but he forced a welcome smile in the dark night. “I’m glad you’re here,” he told Johnny Feathers, who was apparently the Indian’s leader. Feathers, who had been given his name by John Preble, who negotiated for the State with the Penobscot tribe, neither answered nor even acknowledged the greeting. Feathers and his men, he had brought sixteen this night, squatted at the edge of the trees and scraped whetstones over the blades of their short axes. Tomahawks, Wadsworth supposed. He wondered if they were drunk. The general’s order that no liquor was to be given to the Indians had met with small success, but so far as Wadsworth could tell these men were sober as churchwardens. Not that he cared, drunk or sober the Indians were among his best warriors, though Solomon Lovell was more skeptical of their loyalties. “They’ll want something in exchange for helping us,” he had told Wadsworth, “and not just wampum. Guns, probably, and God knows what they’ll do with those.”
“Hunt?”
“Hunt what?”
But the Indians were here. The seventeen braves had muskets, but had all chosen to carry tomahawks as their primary weapon. The militia and marines had muskets with fixed bayonets. “I don’t want any man firing prematurely,” Wadsworth told his militiamen and saw, in the small light of the waning moon, the look of incomprehension on too many faces. “Don’t cock your muskets till you need to shoot,” he told them. “If you stumble and fall I don’t want a shot alerting the enemy. And you,” he pointed to a small boy who was armed with a sheathed bayonet and an enormous drum, “keep your drum silent till we’ve won!”
“Yes, sir.”
Wadsworth crossed to the boy who looked scarcely a day over eleven or twelve. “What’s your name, boy?”
“John, sir.”
“John what?”
“John Freer, sir.” John Freer’s voice had not broken. He was rake-thin, nothing but skin, bones, and wide eyes, but those eyes were bright and his back was straight.
“A good name,” Wadsworth said, “free and Freer. Tell me, John Freer, do you have your letters?”
“My letters, sir?”
“Can you read or write?”
The boy looked shifty. “I can read some, sir.”
“Then when this is all over,” Wadsworth said, “we must teach you the rest, eh?”
“Yes, sir,” Freer said unenthusiastically.
“He brings us luck, General,” an older man put in. He placed a protective hand on the boy’s shoulder. “We can’t lose if Johnny Freer is with us, sir.”
“Where are your parents, John?” Wadsworth asked.
“Both dead,” the older man answered, “and I’m his grandfather.”
“I want to stay with the company, sir!” John Freer said eagerly. He had divined that Wadsworth was contemplating an order that he stay behind.
“We’ll look after him, sir,” the grandfather said, “we always do.”
“Just keep your drum quiet till we’ve beaten them, John Freer,” Wadsworth said and patted the boy on the head. “After that you can wake the dead for all I care.”
Wadsworth had three hundred militiamen, or rather two hundred and ninety-nine militiamen and one small drummer boy. Saltonstall had kept his word and sent fifty marines and had added a score of the
“They’re most welcome,” Wadsworth had said.
“And they will fight!” Carnes said enthusiastically. “Demons, they are.”
The seamen were on the right. The militiamen and Indians were in the center and Captain Carnes and his marines on the left. Lieutenant Dennis was second in command of the marines. They were all lined at the edge of the trees by Dyce’s Head, close to Captain Welch’s grave, and to the east the ground dropped gently away towards the Half Moon Battery. Wadsworth could see the enemy earthwork in the small moonlight, and even if it had been dark its position would have been betrayed by two small campfires that burned behind the emplacement. The fort was a dark silhouette on the horizon.
Just beyond the enemy battery were the westernmost houses of the village. The closest, which was dwarfed by a large barn, lay only a few paces beyond the British guns. “That’s Jacob Dyce’s house,” James Fletcher told Wadsworth, “he’s a Dutchman.”
“So no love for the British?”
“Oh, he loves the British, Jacob does. Like as not old Jacob will shoot at us.”
“Let’s hope he’s asleep,” Wadsworth said and hoped all the enemy were sleeping. It was past midnight, a Sunday now, and the peninsula was moonlit black and silver. Small wisps of smoke drifted from chimneys and campfires.
The British sloops were black against the distant water and no lights showed aboard.
Two of the transport ships had been beached at Majabigwaduce’s eastern tip, while the third had been added
