Johnny Tremain (24 page)

Before the Town House, Colonel Nesbit ordered a halt, and an orderly came forward and read a proclamation. It merely explained what was being done and why, and threatened like treatment to the next buyer of stolen weapons.

Then (Colonel Nesbit was evidently a newspaper reader) the regiment went to Marshall Lane and stopped before the office of the
Spy.
The threat was made that the editor of that paper would soon be treated like the bird in the cart. Then they were heading for Edes and Gill's office. Johnny guessed the
Observer
would come next after the
Boston Gazette,
and ran to Salt Lane to warn Uncle Lorne. He jumped into the shop, slamming the door after him, looking wildly about for the printer. Rab, in his printer's apron, was standing at his bench, quietly setting type.

'Rab! How'd you do it? How'd you get away?'

Rab's eyes glittered. In spite of his great air of calm, he was angry.

'Colonel Nesbit said I was just a child. "Go buy a popgun, boy," he said. They flung me out the back door. Told me to go home.'

Then Johnny laughed. He couldn't help it. Rab had always, as far as Johnny knew, been treated as a grown man and always looked upon himself as such.

'So all he did was hurt your feelings.'

Rab grinned suddenly, but a little thinly. Johnny told of the tar-and-feathering of the farmer and also that he expected in a short time the Forty-Seventh Regiment would come marching down Salt Lane and stop before the door to read that proclamation about tar-and-feathering seditious newspaper publishers.

'And here they come—those dressed-up red monkeys. But they don't dare do anything but stop, read a proclamation, and move on.'

When this was over and the troops moved on down the lane to Union, Johnny and Rab stood in the street and watched them.

'Luckily,' said Rab, 'I didn't give my money in advance. I'll return it to Aunt Jenifer.'

But he still stood in the street watching the stiff rhythm of the marching troops, the glitter of their guns and bayonets, the dazzle of the white and scarlet disappearing at the bottom of the Lane.

'They'll make good targets, all right,' he said absent-mindedly. 'Out in Lexington they are telling us, "Pick off the officers first, then the sergeants." Those white crosses on their chests are easy to sight on...'

His words frightened Johnny a little. Lieutenant Stranger, Sergeant Gale, Major Pitcairn ... Johnny could not yet think of them as targets. Rab could.

Back of the Lyte house were apple trees, now heavy with fruit. Johnny and Cilla sat together on a bench. He had missed her that month she had been out in Milton. It was still summer, but everywhere you could smell and feel the coming of fall. It had been an interesting conversation. Madge had run off and married Sergeant Gale, and Ma had been so put to it to keep Mr. Tweedie in the family she had married him herself.

'She said he was too old for me and she knows he's too young for her, but he's a clever smith and she's going to hang on to him—come Hell and high water.' Cilla bent her face over the work in her lap. She was rolling a tiny hem on a tiny handkerchief. One of Miss Lavinia's.

'So she's Mrs. Tweedie now?'

'Yes. Maria Tweedie. That's not so bad. You know you have to marry someone whose last name goes with your first. For instance, if my name was Rue, I couldn't marry a man named Barb, or if my name happened to be Tobacco, I couldn't marry a man called Pouch or Pipe or...'

'Nobody was ever named Tobacco.'

'You don't know. If a Southern merchant made a lot of money on tobacco, I think he might name his daughter ... Tobacco.'

'We make money on codfish around here and I never heard anyone calling his girl Codfish. You're just being silly.'

'But I like to be silly. I like to plan things out; for instance, I ... couldn't marry a man called...'

'Anybody called Priscilla can marry anybody.'

'No, they can't. For instance, I couldn't marry Rab.'

Johnny froze. From being mildly irritated, but interested, he was a little angry.

'Nobody asked you to,' he said shortly.

'I know. But a girl has to think about things like that. Almost anything can happen to a girl. Suddenly. And she has to think ahead so she'll know which way to jump.'

'Rab wouldn't marry
you.
He's too ... too...'

'Wonderful?' Cilla gave him one of her sweet, veiled glances out of the corner of her eye. 'That's what you mean?'

It was exactly what Johnny had meant.

'Of course not. But he's not like any other boy I ever knew.'

Cilla did not look at the work in her idle fingers. She stared off down Beacon Hill. From where they sat, they could see the ocean.

'I know that. But when you get to really know him, he doesn't seem so wonderful. I mean he's just as
wonderful,
but a whole lot nicer.'

Johnny did not want to ask the next question, but he could not help it.

'Have you ... how'd you get to know him ... so well?'

She looked surprised. 'Why, he comes here and takes me walking and buys me sweets, and once he took me to Old South to hear Doctor Warren.'

Rab had never said anything about this to Johnny. It was well enough to say Rab was secretive by nature and couldn't help the way God had made him, but Johnny felt piqued. Cilla noticed the shadow on his face.

'Priscilla Silsbee is poor. But Cilla Silsbee is worse.'

Johnny's lower lip stuck out. Seemingly without any action of the wind, his fair hair was rumpled all over his head.

'But Priscilla Tremain is a fine name,' she went on. 'I've thought about that ever since you came to the shop and Mother told me I had to marry you. I was eleven then...'

Then they had both been eleven. She a skinny little thing, with a gentle face and disturbing tongue. Her clothes had always been too big for her because they were handed down from Dorcas. She had had to pin her skirts tight about her waist to keep them on. Pretty and shabby, and sweet and sour. Johnny had liked her right off. He had not thought much about what she looked like now. But he looked at her as she bent her face to her work. The little pointed chin settled into the fresh white ruffles about her throat. Somehow her hair was curly around the edges and straight everywhere else. She had a shallow little nose and on either side of the bridge lay those long lashes which could mock him as well as her tongue. And so pretty he could not believe it. He was accustomed to staring at Lavinia Lyte's famous beauty and to feel a pleasant tingle up and down his spine. And now it was Cilla Lapham, just good old Cilla, that was giving him spinal creeps.

When he was eleven, he had said he would marry her—if he had to. And when he was fourteen, he had said he wouldn't take her on a gold platter. He was fifteen now. And soon he would be a grown-up man going courting like Rab.

Cilla was packing up her sewing.

'Miss Lavinia will be wanting her tea and I must get Isannah dressed, brushed, powdered, and perfumed to sit with her.'

One of the soldiers of the Fourth Regiment who were encamped upon the Common was earning a little money helping at the Lyte stable. As Cilla moved away from Johnny, the groom leaped forward to open the kitchen door for her. Why, that mannered monkey—bowing and flunkying about because of just Cilla Lapham. That red-headed parrot couldn't even talk English right. But he had known what Johnny had not. Cilla was a grown-up young lady—and she was pretty.

'Cilla,' Johnny yelled at her, 'come back a moment—please.' She left the groom bowing and smirking.

'Yes?' she said, standing before Johnny under the apple trees.

'Look here. What's that fellow's name?'

'Pumpkin.'

'That's not a name.'

'Yes, it is. It's his.'

'Nobody ever—no girl could be a Mrs. Pumpkin?'

'Nobody ever.'

There was so long a pause, Johnny's next words sounded awkward.

'You were right about one thing. Priscilla Tremain—that's a fine name.' He had meant to make a joke, but as the words left his mouth, it was not.

They both stood, embarrassed, looking at their feet.

Cilla did not answer, but she reached up through the foliage of the tree and picked a little green apple. She gave it to him.

'I didn't know even winter apples were still so green,' she said, and walked off toward the house without a glance for the admiring Pumpkin.

Johnny put the apple in his pocket. He'd keep it forever. It meant that Cilla really thought Tremain was a fine name. No ... you can't keep even little green apples forever. It would wizen up, or grow ripe, or it might rot. Human relations never seem to stand completely still. This apple, for instance. It might ripen into something better than it now was, or, unromantically, it might rot away in his pocket.

He put it on the window-sill and a little superstitiously waited to see what it would do. But Rab ate the apple.

Johnny, already jealous, for the first time in his life, over Rab's taking Cilla out, buying her sweets—and never saying anything—tried his best to quarrel with a puzzled Rab over this apple.

It ended as Johnny might have guessed it would. Rab refused to be impressed with his crime. All he had done was to eat a wormy, no-good apple. He'd give Johnny a peck of better ones, 'just so you'll stop glaring at me.'

'Was it really wormy, Rab?'

'It was.'

He had been a fool to think of the apple as a symbol of himself and Cilla.

It was fall, and for the last time Sam Adams bade Johnny summon the Observers for eight o'clock that night.

'After this we will not meet again, for I believe Gage knows all about us. He might be moved to arrest Mr. Lorne. He might send soldiers to arrest us all.'

'I hardly think they would hang the whole club, sir. Only you and Mr. Hancock.'

Johnny had meant this for a compliment, but Sam Adams looked more startled than pleased.

'It has been noticed that every so often many of us are seen going up and down Salt Lane, entering the printing shop. We must, in the future, meet in small groups. But once more, and for the last time ... And make as good a punch for us as you can.'

As Johnny went from house to house talking about unpaid bills of eight shillings, he was thinking of the punch. Not one ship had come into Boston for five months except British ships. Only the British officers had limes, lemons, and oranges these days—they and their friends among the Boston Tories. Miss Lyte had God's plenty of friends among the British officers. He'd get his tropical fruit there.

Mrs. Bessie listened to him.

'And who's going to eat these fruits or drink them, if I do give you some?'

'Well ... Sam Adams for one.'

'Don't say any more. Give me your dispatch bag, Johnny.' She returned with it bulging.

'No limes, though. Izzy eats them all.'

'Does she do tricks for them? Like she used to for the sailors along Hancock's Wharf?'

Tricks?
Does she do tricks? Lieutenant Stranger has taught her a rigmarole about poor Nell Gwyn selling fruit at a theater. I don't need to tell you how she carries on.'

'What happened to that Cousin Sewall?'

'Gone to Worcester. Joined up with the Minute Men.'

'But he's too fat and...'

'Soft? No. From now on nobody's too fat nor soft nor old nor young. The time's coming.'

It would be a small meeting, for of the twenty-two original members many had already left town to get away from the threat of arrest by the British. Josiah Quincy was in England. Of the three revolutionary doctors, only Church and Warren remained. Doctor Young had gone to a safer spot. James Otis was at the moment in Boston. Johnny had not notified him, although he had founded this club in the first place. Ever since he had grown so queer, the other members did not wish him about, even in his lucid periods. He talked and talked. Nobody could get a word in edgewise when James Otis talked.

This, the last meeting, started with the punch bowl on the table instead of ending with it. There was no chairman nor was there any time when the two boys were supposed to withdraw. They were talking about how Gage had at last dared send out a sortie beyond the gate of Boston and, before the Minute Men got word of their plans, they had seized cannon and gunpowder over in Charlestown, got into their boats and back to Boston. Not one shot had been fired and it was all too late when the alarm had been spread and thousands of armed farmers had arrived. By then the British were safe home again. Yet, Sam Adams protested, this rising up of an army of a thousand from the very soil of New England had badly frightened General Gage. Once the alarm spread that the British had left Boston, the system of calling up the Minute Men had worked well indeed. The trouble had been in Boston itself.

'In other words, gentlemen, it was our fault. If we could have known but an hour, two hours, in advance what the British were intending, our men would have been there before the British troops arrived instead of a half-hour after they left.'

Johnny had been told off to carry letters for the British officers, to keep on good terms with their grooms and stable boys over at the Afric Queen. Somehow he had failed. He hadn't known. Nobody had known that two hundred and sixty redcoats were getting into boats, slipping off up the Mystic, seizing Yankee gunpowder, and rowing it back to Castle Island for themselves.

Paul Revere was saying, 'We must organize a better system of watching their movements—but in such a way that they will not realize they are being watched.'

Sam and John Adams were standing and the other members were crowding about them, shaking hands with them, wishing them success at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. They were starting the next day. Everyone was ready to give them advice on whom to see, what to say, or to prophesy the outcome of this Congress. Paul Revere and Joseph Warren were apart a little, making plans for that spy system which was needed badly. They called Johnny to them, but he could hear one of the men standing about the two Adamses saying, 'But there must be some hope we can still patch up our differences with England. Sir, you will work for peace?'