Читать книгу The Collected Prose Works of Stephen Vincent Benét - Stephen Vincent Benét - Страница 8

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Well, with that Revere started moving, and, when he started to move, he moved fast. He was calling for his riding boots in one breath and telling Lige Butterwick to come back tomorrow in another—and, what with all the bustle and confusion, Lige Butterwick nearly went off without his liniment after all. But he grabbed up a box from the counter, just as Revere was practically shoving him out of the door—and it wasn’t till he’d got to his tavern and gone to bed for the night that he found out he’d taken the wrong box.

He found it out then because, when he went to bed, he couldn’t get to sleep. It wasn’t his tooth that bothered him—that had settled to a kind of dull ache and he could have slept through that. But his mind kept going over all the events of the day—the two folks he’d seen at Parson Clarke’s and being chased by the British and what Revere had said to the turkey-gobbler woman—till he couldn’t get any peace. He could feel something stirring in him, though he didn’t know what it was.

“ ’Tain’t right to have soldiers chase a fellow down the street,” he said to himself. “And ’tain’t right to have people like that woman run down New England. No, it ain’t. Oh me—I better look for that liniment of Mr. Revere’s.”

So he got up from his bed and went over and found his coat. Then he reached his hand in the pocket and pulled out the silver box.

Well, at first he was so flustrated that he didn’t know rightly what to do. For here, as well as he could remember it, was gunpowder and war and the makings of a new nation—the revolution itself, shut up in a silver box by Paul Revere. He mightn’t have believed there could be such things before he came to Boston. But now he did.

The draught was still humming in his head, and his legs felt a mite wobbly. But, being human, he was curious. “Now, I wonder what is inside that box,” he said.

He shook the box and handled it, but that seemed to make it warmer, as if there was something alive inside it, so he stopped that mighty quick. Then he looked all over it for a keyhole, but there wasn’t any keyhole, and, if there had been, he didn’t have a key.

Then he put his ear to the box and listened hard. And it seemed to him that he heard, very tiny and far away, inside the box, the rolling fire of thousands of tiny muskets and the tiny, far-away cheers of many men. “Hold your fire!” he heard a voice say. “Don’t fire till you’re fired on—but, if they want a war, let it begin here!” And then there was a rolling of drums and a squeal of fifes. It was small, still, and far away, but it made him shake all over, for he knew he was listening to something in the future—and something that he didn’t have a right to hear. He sat down on the edge of his bed, with the box in his hands.

“Now, what am I going to do with this?” he said. “It’s too big a job for one man.”

Well, he thought, kind of scared, of going down to the river and throwing the box in, but, when he thought of doing it, he knew he couldn’t. Then he thought of his farm near Lexington and the peaceful days. Once the revolution was out of the box, there’d be an end to that. But then he remembered what Revere had said when he was talking with the woman about the silver—the thing about building a new country and building it clean and plain. “Why, I’m not a Britisher,” he thought. “I’m a New Englander. And maybe there’s something beyond that—something people like Hancock and Adams know about. And, if it has to come with a revolution—well, I guess it has to come. We can’t stay Britishers forever, here in this country.”

He listened to the box again, and now there wasn’t any shooting in it—just a queer tune played on a fife. He didn’t know the name of the tune, but it lifted his heart.

He got up, sort of slow and heavy. “I guess I’ll have to take this back to Paul Revere,” he said.

Well, the first place he went was Dr. Warren’s, having heard Revere mention it, but he didn’t get much satisfaction there. It took quite a while to convince them that he wasn’t a spy, and, when he did, all they’d tell him was that Revere had gone over the river to Charlestown. So he went down to the waterfront to look for a boat. And the first person he met was a very angry woman.

“No,” she said, “you don’t get any boats from me. There was a crazy man along here an hour ago and he wanted a boat, too, and my husband was crazy enough to take him. And then, do you know what he did?”

“No, mam,” said Lige Butterwick.

“He made my husband take my best petticoat to muffle the oars so they wouldn’t make a splash when they went past that Britisher ship,” she said, pointing out where the man-of-war Somerset lay at anchor. “My best petticoat, I tell you! And when my husband comes back he’ll get a piece of my mind!”

“Was his name Revere?” said Lige Butterwick. “Was he a man of forty-odd, keen-looking and kind of Frenchy?”

“I don’t know what his right name is,” said the woman, “but his name’s mud with me. My best petticoat tore into strips and swimming in that nasty river!” And that was all he could get out of her.

All the same, he managed to get a boat at last—the story doesn’t say how—and row across the river. The tide was at young flood and the moonlight bright on the water, and he passed under the shadow of the Somerset, right where Revere had passed. When he got to the Charlestown side, he could see the lanterns in North Church, though he didn’t know what they signified. Then he told the folks at Charlestown he had news for Revere and they got him a horse and so he started to ride. And, all the while, the silver box was burning his pocket.

Well, he lost his way more or less, as you well might in the darkness, and it was dawn when he came into Lexington by a side road. The dawn in that country’s pretty, with the dew still on the grass. But he wasn’t looking at the dawn. He was feeling the box burn his pocket and thinking hard.

Then, all of a sudden, he reined up his tired horse. For there, on the side road, were two men carrying a trunk—and one of them was Paul Revere.

They looked at each other and Lige began to grin. For Revere was just as dirty and mud-splashed as he was—he’d warned Hancock and Adams all right, but then, on his way to Concord, he’d got caught by the British and turned loose again. So he’d gone back to Lexington to see how things were there—and now he and the other fellow were saving a trunk of papers that Hancock had left behind, so they wouldn’t fall into the hands of the British.

Lige swung off his horse. “Well, Mr. Revere,” he said, “you see, I’m on time for that little appointment about my tooth. And, by the way, I’ve got something for you.” He took the box from his pocket. And then he looked over toward Lexington Green and caught his breath. For, on the Green, there was a little line of Minute Men—neighbors of his, as he knew—and, in front of them, the British regulars. And, even as he looked, there was the sound of a gunshot, and, suddenly, smoke wrapped the front of the British line and he heard them shout as they ran forward.

Lige Butterwick took the silver box and stamped on it with his heel. And with that the box broke open—and there was a dazzle in his eyes for a moment and a noise of men shouting—and then it was gone.

“Do you know what you’ve done?” said Revere. “You’ve let out the American Revolution!”

“Well,” said Lige Butterwick, “I guess it was about time. And I guess I’d better be going home, now. I’ve got a gun on the wall there. And I’ll need it.”

“But what about your tooth?” said Paul Revere.

“Oh, a tooth’s a tooth,” said Lige Butterwick. “But a country’s a country. And, anyhow, it’s stopped aching.”

All the same, they say Paul Revere made a silver tooth for him, after the war. But my great-aunt wasn’t quite sure of it, so I won’t vouch for that.