Free The Proud and the Free by Howard Fast Page B

no one seemed to mind that. The women gave the Gary boys as good as they took, telling them, Now why don’t you take over this molding, if ye’re so bright and strong and free with affection? And as she worked, MacPherson’s lass sang: The Bishop’s wife, she looked me down, ye’re either fine or common, I got what ye can never match, and sure it’s far from common.
    And how is a man to treat the sick with this stinking lead boiling?… Hunt wanted to know … Already, we are cursed with committees, for the first Committee man comes and turns this into a jail, and then comes the second snooking for supply. The lead he spies, and orders it to be bullets before nightfall come.
    Come out a ye tout, laughed MacPherson. The less sick we meddle with, the more will survive, and this is a fine piece of organization. I tell ye, we got a natural bent for committees.
    But my heart was heavy as I left there. Suppose Chester should be missed and a search made? And didn’t all this activity indicate that the gentry had a whiff of something?
    From the hospital, we started a check of the hutments, but already the thing was in motion of itself, and every third or fourth hut there would be a black, cold silence until I had shown the warrant the Jew Levy wrote out for me. The men were in the straw and the encampment was dead – a silence and withdrawal that would have been suspicious on any other day than New Year’s.
    Because it was New Year’s Day, much went by that would not have passed muster in the normal course of things. There was no parade and no drill; and until midafternoon, aside from Wayne and his orderlies, no officers approached the hutments; Lieutenant Chester was not missed, which was not so strange, for we learned afterwards that his mess had thought him to be with Wayne and Wayne had thought him to be back by now at the Kemble House. In any case, though the officers neither knew nor cared what we did that New Year’s Day, the hutments were full of talk about how the gentry passed their time, once they had slept off their drunkenness of the night before. And they could not have better confirmed us in what we had decided to do.
    There was, around our encampment, a ring of great holdings of the gentry, some of them patroons, some of them British quality, and all of them loyal to His Majesty, George III. We learned well the year before, when we encamped at this same place, to respect that loyalty, for eight men of the 4th Regiment who broke into Peter Kemble’s grain bin were docked their pay and given thirty lashes each. The pay was nothing, for we never got it anyway, but thirty lashes is a cruel and terrible thing, and one of the lads, a boy of fifteen, died from the beating. Peter Kemble held over four thousand acres of land, with three manor houses upon it and sixteen barns, and for all that he was open and brash and defiant with his loyalty to the King, never a step was taken against him; instead, our own gentry snuggled up to him, for he was a true gentleman and hunted his hounds day in and day out, and in return for their respectful consideration, he quartered our officers, lent them his hounds to hunt with, and fed them at his board nightly. It was one of those things – as I came to know later – that are understood among gentlemen, even though they fight on different sides; but it was not understood by the buckskin men in our ranks, those who came from the Western counties, Scottish men with a century-old dream of an acre of land for their own, bound out to America to realize their dream – and discovering then that, far from their having land, they could never get enough hard money to own woven clothes or an iron tool.
    So when word passed through the hutments that four musicians had come up from Philadelphia to play for a New Year’s minuet at the Kemble House, and that two carriages of Philadelphia ladies had followed them – and that there were