Rabble on a Hill. Robert Edmond Alter

and into an azalea thicket. They looked across the field and at the moon-bright road. Paul had evidently tried to ride for a nearby copse of wood but had been captured by six more regulars who had been in hiding there.

      Now they had him in the road and were questioning him. A Major Mitchell was in charge of the patrol, and he wasn’t being very nice about it. He clapped a pistol to the side of Paul’s head.

      “Who are you?”

      “Paul Revere.”

      “Well, isn’t that wonderful! So we’ve caught the famous Revere, have we? The bully boy of the Sons of Liberty. Paugh! I’ve seen better looking parodies of a man on Guy Fawkes Day! What are you up to? Answer quick, or by Jove, I’ll put daylight ’tween your waxy ears!”

      “Rousing the countryside,” Paul said. “Every town for miles around has been alarmed, and five hundred men are assembling at Lexington.”

      “Why is he telling them that, for goshsake?” Nat whispered.

      “Good old Paul,” Billy whispered back. “He can’t help boasting.”

      But the boast served a useful purpose, for just at that moment they all heard the distant pam-pam of alarm guns from somewhere to the east. The regulars started looking around at the surrounding darkness apprehensively.

      They held a greatly agitated council and finally decided to get on their way. They actually had no authority to place Paul under arrest, so they told him he was free to go—without his horse, which they commandeered.

      Nat and Billy waited until the road was vacant and then they came out of hiding and started walking back to Lexington, hoping to overtake Revere. But they never did. By the time they reached the town, Paul had already departed from Parson Clarke’s house in a chaise with Adams and Hancock. A passing militiaman told them that the trio had taken off for Burlington.

      It was now after two o’clock.

      It was the morning of April 19.