Chap. XXVIII} 1775. April 19. |
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that James Hayward, son of the deacon of Acton
church, encountered a regular, and both at the same moment fired; the regular was instantly killed, James Hayward was mortally wounded.
A little further on fell the octogenarian Josiah Haynes, of Sudbury, who had kept pace by the side of the swiftest in the pursuit, with a rugged valor which age had not tempered.
The British troops, ‘greatly exhausted and fatigued, and having expended almost all their ammunition,’ began to run rather than retreat in order.
The officers vainly attempted to stop their flight.
‘They were driven before the Americans like sheep.’
At last, about two in the afternoon, after they had hurried with shameful haste through the middle of the town, about a mile below the field of the morning's bloodshed, the officers got to the front, and by menaces of death, began to form them under a very heavy fire.
At that moment Lord Percy came in sight with the first brigade, consisting of Welsh fusiliers, the fourth, the forty-seventh, and the thirty-eighth regi ments, in all about twelve hundred men, with two field pieces.
Insolent as usual, they marched out of Boston to the tune of Yankee Doodle; but they grew alarmed at finding every house on the road deserted.
They met not one person to give them tidings of the party whom they were sent to rescue; and now that they had made the junction, they could think only of their own safety.
While the cannon kept the Americans at bay, Percy formed his detachment into a square, enclosing the fugitives, who lay down for rest on the ground, ‘their tongues hanging out of their mouths like those of dogs after a chase.’
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