ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about the story of the capture, trial, and execution of a Hessian drummer boy by Americans during the Revolution. At the heart of the story is a Quaker family, who hide the boy after his landing party has been killed in an ambush. The story is told from the point of view of Evan Feversham, a doctor who has seen enough of death, and an outsider in the narrow world of Puritan New England. Little enough happens on the Ridge, from season to season, that might be called an event. Indeed, once winter sets in, the Ridge can be the most isolated place in the world, and spring brings its own excitement, its own opening up; and here in this late and lovely springtime was that fiercest of all drama, a man on trial for his life, and not just any man but that most hated of all men in those strange years one lived through, Hessian.
