Rabble on a Hill. Robert Edmond Alter

less than Latin.

      “Injun,” Shad muttered. “I can read Mingo like you’d read a tavern notice, but this ain’t Mingo.” Then, perusing the strip closely, he said “Hmm!” and “Huh!” and finally “Ha!”

      “Look here, Natty. See that word? ‘Androscoggins.’ That’s an Abenaki word. Tell you what. We got a fella on the committee, Jessie Greene, who’s made a study of Injun lingo. He keeps a wholesale winery at the foot of Hancock’s Wharf, and we been meeting Revere there in secret lately. I could take it over to him and see what he thinks it is.”

      Nat hesitated. “I promised that man I wouldn’t let anybody else have it.”

      Shad nodded understandingly. “Sure. Well, I’ll just slip over there tomorrow morning and see the boys, tell ’em about it. You can’t tell: it might just be something important.”

      Nat cut the greasy rawhide thong from the horn and attached it to the roll of birchbark, then looped it about his neck and shoved it inside his shirt.

      Yes, he thought. Important enough that a man killed to get it, and a man died to keep it.

      3

      I DON’T MIND DYING, BUT . . .

      The house was packed the next night. Even the aisles were jammed. It was Standing Room Only. And once again the famous jousting scene between Robin Hood and Little John was a howling success. Benny was in a hysteria of happiness; he was forever attempting to throw his spindly arms about Shad to give him brotherly hugs . . . and Shad was forever giving him hasty, brotherly, straight-armed shoves away.

      Benny’s only worry concerned the expense of burning up a fresh backdrop every night (and two on Saturday); and Nat’s and Shad’s only worry concerned the unpleasant possibility of not escaping in time from under the burning backdrop some night.

      After the show Nat and Shad sat before the tarnished mirror to remove their greasepaint, and Shad said: “Jessie and the other boys want to see you and that birchbark you got. We can skip over there right now. There’s a mob fight going on over to the Common, and we ain’t likely to run afoul of no patrol tonight.”

      Nat paused for a moment, staring at his grease-sheened reflection in the mirror. In a way he was a little doubtful of becoming personally involved in the hotbed of Boston politics. In another way he was impulsively glad, excited. But one way or another it seemed inexorable—and had been ever since he had unwittingly darted into that alleyway off Tremont Street.

      “All right,” he said simply.

      Greene’s warehouse had the damp, heady odor of brick walls long submerged in wine. The square façade was dark and shuttered for the night. It seemed to bear the somber aspect of a business building brooding over the wistful memory of old, happy, by-gone commercial days, as if watching a ghostly parade of long-gone customers coming and going. But then all the mercantile houses in Boston bore the same scar, ever since Gage’s Port Act.

      Shad gave a tricky knock on the heavy slab door, and a minute later the spark of an eye appeared at the peephole.

      A hoarse voice seemed to issue from the eye. “The word?”

      “Doc,” Shad said.

      “Doc who?”

      “Oh for grab’s sake! Doc Warren, that’s who! You bent-headed old coot! Now open up! Who do I look like to you—Lord Rawdon?”

      The eye winked away with a throaty chuckle. Shad grinned at Nat.

      “That’s Ed Norton, Jessie’s head clerk. He’s a great one for passwords and secret signs and all that hocus-pocus.”

      The door swung open, and they stepped into tomblike darkness. Nat jumped when he suddenly heard the hoarse voice right at his shoulder.

      “The Committee is waiting for you in the cellar, Shadrach.”

      “Shadrach?” Nat repeated. He heard Shad clear his throat.

      “Ed, if I could just see you, I’d take you by the ears and ankles and pull you inside out and see how you looked hoppin’ about on your nose!” The disembodied Ed chuckled at Nat’s side, and gave Nat a nudge in the ribs.

      “That’s why I ain’t about to strike a light, Shad,” he said.

      “Is Shadrach really your name?” Nat asked.

      “Well, what did you think it was—Shadow?” Shad fumed.

      Mutely they stumbled along a narrow blind corridor to a door which opened to the pale glow of a slush lamp on a shelf. Ed—seventy years old if he was a day, as bald as a new-born baby, with a hooked, red-veined nose which suggested that it was his habit to sample every keg of wine received by the establishment—picked up the lamp and led them down a flight of breakneck stairs to a cellar so dank and malodorous that Nat wanted to turn around and go upstairs again.

      You couldn’t see the walls for the barrels barrels barrels of spirits. French wines, Spanish wines, Italian wines, rum from the Caribbean, brandy from New Orleans, African Madeira . . . you could get befuddled just from looking at it, let alone smelling it.

      A cluster of men were sitting around a small table bearing a burning whale-oil lantern. They were pawing through a clutter of maps, and a blue-gray smoke coiled voluptuously over their heads as they puff-puffed contemplatively at their clay pipes.

      “Paul,” Shad called. “This here’s Nat Towne I tolt you about.”

      A stocky, pouchy man of about Shad’s age, with a greasy smile and excitable eyes, stood up and welcomed Nat with his hand.

      “Hi, Nat. Shad says you ran into some trouble last night. But here, meet the boys. This is Billy Dawes, an express rider.”

      Nat shook hands with a well-setup young fellow who winked at him gaily. Then he met Jessie Greene, the owner of the warehouse: a short, blocky man with a squarelike figure; his head too. He had a bland face and a mild smile and a firm handgrip.

      Then there was a dour, lemon-faced man called John Boyd, who handed Nat a damp hand like a limp fish; and Mathew Commings, who right off the bat told Nat he’d been a participant in the Boston Massacre; and Harvey Allen, who wore a thick red beard and who had deserted from His Majesty’s navy five years before; and finally, at the head of the table, Doctor Joseph Warren.

      He was a moody, handsome man in his early thirties. He had a quiet smile and quiet ways. Lord Rawdon had publicly called him the greatest incendiary in all America, and Nat, frankly, had expected to meet a much more bombastic man.

      “What’s yer tale, myte?” Allen asked abruptly. “ ’Oo was the cove what got done in in the alley last night?”

      “I don’t know,” Nat told them. “He was in deerskins, I know that. And he had this powder horn Shad’s told you about.”

      “And you never saw the assailant?” Warren asked.

      “No, sir. Not to be able to recognize him again. He was just a shape in the dark.”

      “May I see the roll of birchbark now?” Jessie Greene suggested.

      Nat removed it from his neck and handed it over. Anticipatively, the Patriots—except Warren, who remained seated and calmly smoking—gathered around Jessie Greene as he unrolled the strip of bark and placed it under the lantern-light.

      “It’s Abenaki, right enough. Unfortunately, I’m not as well versed in the language as I am with the Western dialects. Let’s see . . . as near as I can make out it is a message from some of the important sachems of the Androscoggin and Kennebec tribes, intended for the Seneca Nation.”

      “Then it must be from Paul Higgins,” Warren suggested.

      Jessie nodded, muttering to himself as he traced his finger down the bark strip. Nat looked at Shad. “Who’s Higgins?” he whispered.

      “Chief