Rabble on a Hill. Robert Edmond Alter

look at Shad’s stricken face assured Nat that his huge friend’s mind was a complete blank. Shad had been struck dumb by that well-known thespian ailment, stage fright. He looked so utterly gargantuan in his ridiculous costume and with that strained expression of baffled bewilderment on his great moony face that the audience continued to greet him with volley upon volley of raucous laughter.

      “I shall cross me over this instant?” Nat repeated helpfully.

      Shad picked up his staff, sucked in his breath, and cut loose.

      “What news, cried Robin!” he bellowed.

      “No no!” Nat hissed. “Not Cried Robin: just What news.”

      “What news!” cried Shad. “Fence comes this spaking creature I see towering over me?”

      The audience went wild again. Nat “towered over” Shad about the way a toadstool towers over a grizzly bear. And then it got worse.

      “Spake your vame, narlet!” Shad roared.

      With a sense of impending disaster Nat stepped up on his end of the log, saying: “Little John is my name, little—[he dropped his voice at that word, but the audience caught it with another howl]—man. And I desire to cross yon log!”

      Shad, according to direction, hauled himself up on his end of the log and immediately the blame log began to shift in its blocks, and he started wobbling precariously, wig-wagging his staff in both hands to reëstablish his center of equilibrium.

      “Fffff-fine,” he stammered desperately. “Bbbb-but fff-first let’s joust a bit!”

      Joust heck! It was all either of them could do to maintain his balance on the side-rolling log. Purely by accident the left end of Shad’s staff swung around and fetched Nat a good one on the right hip. Shad snatched and grabbed at the pole and the other end came slicing around and caught Nat on the left shoulder. Nat lost his temper and let Shad have one in the stomach with the end of his staff, and Shad said “Oooff!” and what little balance he had left went south. Shad started side-running on the log, all in the same spot, his left hand taking mighty grabs at the empty air for support and finding none, and all at once over he went and 260-some pounds landed in the tub of water.

      A silvery wave of water sprang up like a tree covered with ice and descended upon Nat with a splashing crash, and then his balance shattered and he went over backward and prat-first into the tub and on top of Shad, and the high end of his staff caught in the backdrop and the whole thing came down over their heads and engulfed them in splashing, wet, shouting darkness.

      By now the audience was half crazy. Some of them had laughed so much they were kicking around on the floor wailing “My stomach! My stomach! My sides are splitting!” One man had a heart attack and another laughed himself into a stroke, and still it didn’t stop because now part of the backdrop had come into contact with the footlights and the tallow candles started eating it up, and all at once and to his utmost horror Nat heard Benny’s muffled voice crying: “Fire! Fire! the giddy backdrop is afire!”

      Thrashing, slipping, shoving at the smothering backdrop (which was like fighting a pillow—punch it here, it pops out there), Nat blundered into Shad in the darkness.

      “What news?” Shad wanted to know.

      “Look out, you fathead! I want out of here!”

      “You want out! You want out!” Shad bellowed. “What a you think I want to do? Cook myself in here like a potato in its jacket?”

      Then, on hands and knees, he finally found a triangular opening in the backdrop and heaved it up, shouting: “Me first! Me first!” His burly, tousled head emerged just in time to catch a bucket of water flush in the face from that energetic self-appointed fireman Benny.

      “Blaugh!” Shad roared, spitting water and blue words all covered with water, and by this time the man who had been having the heart attack had already had it and somehow lived through it, while the fellow who had laughed himself into a stroke was trying to explain to the rest of them that he thought the left side of him was paralyzed, but none of them could hear him because by now they all looked as if they had had strokes or fits or something.

      The curtain, somehow, came down on the jousting scene between Robin Hood and Little John.

      Benny departed for the night beside himself with joy. He had the comic hit of the century on his hands. All he needed was for Shad to show up every night, and twice on Saturday, and go through the same madcap performance he had just presented, and Benny would be able to retire within two years, buy himself a plantation in Virginia, plus a raft of slaves, and live like a Southern gentleman for the rest of his life.

      Shad—needing a place to spend the night—had been strangely reticent about the proposal. He had given a non-committal grunt in answer to Benny’s urgent entreaties.

      “You fellas always live like this?” Shad wanted to know, after everyone else had cleared out and he and Nat had the little theater to themselves. His question had an incredulous tone.

      Nat grinned. “It’s never been quite as frantic as tonight. But this has been the way I’ve lived all my life. My parents were actors, and I was born backstage.” He paused, staring into the middle distance.

      “My parents were both carried off by the pox in ’sixty-three. Benny and the rest of the troupe have taken care of me ever since.”

      Shad looked at him soberly for a moment. Then he said: “Makes us alike in a way, Nat. I never even knew my folks. Senecas got ’em when I was a babe. Senecas brought me up, part way. I’m blood brother to the Laurel Ridgers; that’s a tribe down in Pennsylvany.”

      Shad, Nat discovered, hadn’t been boasting when he’d said he was a friend of George Washington’s. Nat was interested; everyone had heard of the famous militia colonel. Everyone seemed to like him too: patriot, loyalist, even the English held him in great respect.

      “Shucks yes,” Shad said. “Me’n’ Georgie started the French’n’ Injun War together, down in Jumonville’s Glen. Then we fought together at Fort Necessity a month later. And the next year we come back with Braddock——”

      “You were at Braddock’s massacre, Shad?” Nat marveled.

      The huge fellow nodded, his face grim.

      “Yeah. Me’n’ Georgie—we took our lickin’ there.”

      Nat could see that the old battle was still a sore spot with Shad, so he switched away from it. “What have you been doing in Boston?”

      Shad became animated. “Well, I tolt the Committee I wanted to stick around till something busted open, and Sam Adams and Hancock and that Dr. Warren said they’d fix me up. So they put me to work under this here Revere fella. You know Paul? Well, he’s got a batch a fellas workin’ for him—agents, they’re called. And I’m one of ’em! We mosey around town and we listen and look, and what we hear’n’ see we tote back to Revere and he passes it on to Warren, who passes it on to Adams and Hancock.”

      “I see,” Nat said. “Revere is a sort of clearing house for military information. But look, Shad, I’ve heard some pretty mean tales told about Adams and Hancock. What kind of men are they, really?”

      Shad pawed at his beefy face. “What have you heard—that Hancock’s a smuggler?”

      “Well, it’s true enough, isn’t it? He was convicted, and the court placed a one hundred thousand pound fine on him. And the Loyalists say that if he can’t overthrow the King’s government, he’ll be tossed into quod; that it’s a case of rebellion or prison for him.”

      Shad nodded. “Yes, and I suppose you heard about Adams too, eh? How he was made tax collector of Boston, and got kicked out of his job because he couldn’t account for ten thousand pounds he’d supposedly collected?”

      “Yes, I’ve heard.”

      Shad