Rabble on a Hill. Robert Edmond Alter
To Larry Sternig
© 1964 by Robert Edmond Alter
All Rights Reserved
Military power will never awe a sensible American to tamely surrender his liberty.
Samuel Adams, 1768
PROLOGUE
The men who boarded the Dartmouth and the Eleanor and the Beaver looked no more like Mohawk Indians than a clown looks like a prime minister. But it didn’t matter because there weren’t enough British troops quartered in Boston at the time to do anything about it, and the disguise was only a token disguise—a handful of feathers and some warpaint and even an actual tomahawk or two.
So, with a thousand or more spectators standing mutely on Griffin’s Wharf, about a hundred of the “Mohawks” (who wouldn’t fool a four-year-old imaginative child) dumped and destroyed 342 chests of tea, valued at £18,-000, because they didn’t want any American to have to pay the tax on it—let alone drink it if he didn’t feel like it.
That was in the close of 1773, but the news didn’t reach England and the King until March of ’74, and when he heard the good tidings he nearly had a fit. What were those fool Americans thinking of? He was the King of England, wasn’t he? And America was an English colony, wasn’t it? And if he said that his subjects were going to drink the tea and pay a tax on it besides, then by George, that’s what they were going to do! Whether they liked tea or not.
He also said (after he’d calmed down a mite) : “The line of conduct seems now chalked out . . . the New England Governments are in a state of rebellion. Blows must decide whether they are subject to this country or independent.”
Then he decided to slap the naughty Americans on the wrist to teach them a little lesson so that they would know how to behave themselves the next time some loudmouth like Sam Adams or John Hancock or Dr. Warren came up with a harebrained scheme. He appointed General Gage governor of the province of Massachusetts (with 4,000 regulars to back him up), and on June 1 the Port Act went into effect.
Boston Harbor was sealed off from the world by a tight blockade. No ship could enter, no ship could leave. Everything came to a standstill. Trade rolled over with a groan and died. Merchants closed their shops and tore their wigs. Idle, jobless men roamed the streets and loafed on the docks. And without the lifeline of the sea, Boston was a hungry town.
And an angry one.
The yeast of discontent was beginning to ferment into violence. Secret organizations such as the Committee of Communications, the Committee of Safety, the Sons of Liberty, and the Minutemen sprang up overnight, and all along the eastern coast men began to gather weapons and powder and lead for ammunition, and they formed militia companies and drilled in the commons and in the fields and in the roads.
Farmers and merchants and sailors, dock workers and clerks and backwoodsmen, lawyers and doctors and rowdies were preparing for war.
1
H-HERE’S YOURS
Somewhere on Orange Street a crystal crash went pow! in the night, as though a glass grenade had exploded. Instantly there was hooting and cat-calling, and a brawling voice rose above the tumult.
“Run, Tory, run!”
Nat Towne turned into the first shadow-locked alley. He wasn’t about to get himself involved with a Boston mob. These brawls occurred every day, every night now, all over the city. One moment a street would look like any street minding its own business; the next moment some hapless fellow would come somersaulting through a doorway or—if no door was handy—crashing through a lead-paned window, with three or four men raging after him, and he would take off down the street, his unfriendly companions pelting after him; and then, and seemingly from nowhere, other men would spring up, and all at once everyone would be shouting ear-covering language, and the sticks and bricks and fists would start to fly, until the crimson smear of redcoats with their bright dazzle of bayonets would appear and put the mob to rout.
“No thank you,” Nat said. He would just as soon keep his head uncracked, if it was all the same to everyone concerned. Why Benny Frazer had ever thought it advisable to move his troupe of thespians into this hotbed of anger was more than Nat could understand.
He supposed the fool still clung to the futile hope of being able to straddle the fence, wearing a two-way coat showing a loyal lapel on one side and a rebel lapel on the other. And maybe he was right: maybe Boston was the last town in America where a man could at least attempt to walk the middle of the road.
Nat stayed with the alleys, coming into the open only when he had to cross one of the main streets. Behind him the tumult was increasing like an advancing sea, which meant that the mob was having a real knockdown and dragout tonight.
He was halfway across the lantern-bathed cobbles of Tremont Street when three rowdy-looking individuals came rushing past him strung in a line like geese on the wing. The last man was a scrawny fellow with a stick in his hand, and he paused to glare at Nat belligerently.
“Which side are you, brother?” he demanded.
It was one of those questions to which the answer was too often like “heads I lose, tails you win.” Nat made fists of his hands and leaned slightly forward from the waist.
“That’s my business, brother.”
The scrawny one hesitated, sizing the youth up. Nat was only eighteen, but there was six feet of him and his shoulders were impressively broad.
One of the other men looked back and yelled: “Come on, Jerry! Afore the giddy patrol picks us up!”
It was a good enough excuse for the scrawny man. He wagged his stick at Nat and took off, calling back: “Get you later—Tory!”
Nat watched the three rowdies diminish down the gloom of the street, their driving legs chopping at the greasy-looking cobblestones. Then, as a sudden shrill ta-weee of a whistle blew nearby, he got himself off the street, darting into the nearest black mouth of an alleyway.
It was a short passage, and you could see the two-sided opening at the far end like a candle behind an oilpaper window—and the moment he plunged into it he realized he had picked the wrong alley.
Two silhouettes, as sharply defined as though they had been clipped out of black tin, were in a death-grip struggle in the center of the alley. The one, the taller, stumbled on something underfoot and lost his balance and toppled backwards against the brick wall, as the other, shorter, silhouette sprang after him.
Something flashed in the man’s back-swinging hand, paused for a split-second, long enough for the blade to catch a thin red light from one of the distant streetlamps and for the light to dance along the edge like blood. Then he swung it underhand and forward, and Nat heard the heavy, shocked grunt that jerked from the man against the wall.
The shorter man stepped aside as he watched the other man tilt slowly and stiffly away from the wall and topple past him. Then he looked up, and he couldn’t help but see Nat’s silhouette looming toward him.
He went into a crouch, and again the blade caught a glint of light and winked, as he sprang over the prostrate man and came at Nat in one quick hunched bound, hissing: “H-had to h-have a look, didn’t you? Well, h-here’s yours!”
Nat leaped backward, snatching the tricornered felt hat from his head and swung it down and into the passage of the glinting, underswinging knife, and the blade came paring cleanly through the crown and was deflected off course, flashing right on up and almost into Nat’s armpit.
Off balance and not certain of his target (the assailant had veered to the left and out of the frame of lamplight), Nat swung with his left and felt his fist collide with wool-covered flesh and knew his aim was off by a foot. He had connected with the man’s shoulder. But it was a good blow and it was enough. It got the man and the knife away