Especially when it makes good sense.”

“Good sense?” said North. “To join the other side?”

“We’re all Americans. We’re on the same side,” said George North Pike. “I got out of jail because Will used his smart brain, not because you closed the courts.”

“If not for the closin’ of the courts,” answered North, “Henry Knox never would’ve went to Springfield so Will could go there and impress him.”

The father sat at the table, thought about that a moment, and said, “True enough … I’d have to say you both done good.”

Then North dropped into his chair, swept up the petition again, glanced at it, threw it back on the table.

And their father continued to talk more than he had since he came home. “A man with two strong sons is lucky for certain. Especially when they’re strong willed, too. So I’ll stand by both of you. And if one wants to march on the Springfield arsenal and one wants to go to Boston, I say that each of you is right.”

AT DAWN TWO days later, the brothers bade goodbye to their father. Will had stoked the fire and made an extra-large pot of cornmeal mush. North had brought in three days’ worth of firewood and promised he would be back before it ran out.

At the meetinghouse, two dozen Pelham Regulators were waiting. A bonfire released waving sheets of warmth into the gray sky and lent a strangely festive air to the scene. But the bundled bodies of men hulked inward against the cold and the tentlike stacks of muskets—fewer muskets than men, to be sure—gave the moment a more appropriate foreshadowing. Will Pike smelled snow and trouble in the wind.

Daniel Shays stood on the meetinghouse steps, motionless under a black wool cape. Doc Hines stood near him, holding a ledger on which he was writing the names of the men as they arrived.

“Hot rebellion in the freezin’ cold!” shouted North Pike.

“Mornin’ boys,” said Shays. “Glad to see the both of you.”

“I’ll set down both names, then?” asked Doc Hines.

“Not mine,” said Will. “I’m only goin’ as far as Palmer.”

“Palmer?” Hines looked faintly comical with a scarf tied around his ears and his tricorne plunked on top of it. “If it’s Palmer and no farther, why go at all?”

“He’s gettin’ the coach in Palmer,” said North. “Goin’ to Boston. Goin’ to do our politickin’.”

“Politickin’?” said Doc Hines. “Who appointed him?”

North said, “I did,” so that it sounded like a threat. And Shays said, “Good. We need good men doin’ our talkin’.”

After that, no one said a bad word to Will Pike. They wished him Godspeed in Palmer, and he wished them the same. Any who watched were struck by his farewell to North: a strong handshake and a brotherly embrace. One had inherited his father’s analytical calm, the other the fiery nature of a mother they did not remember. One headed east toward politics; the other went west to war.

And the northeast wind gusted across the snow-fields.

THE NEXT MORNING, Will Pike awoke to the sound of farting.

He was in a bed with two other men, in a chamber containing another bed and three more men, in the Post Road hostelry known as the Wayside Inn. And someone in his bed was farting. He guessed that the culprit was the clockmaker named Adolf Gefahlz, who had partaken of a bowl of cabbage soup in the taproom before retiring.

Will got up and cracked a window to let in a bit of fresh air. He was glad to see that the snow, which had stopped them the night before, had now stopped falling. They were a day’s ride from Boston, a day and a night by foot, but to keep his appointment with Rufus King, Will had resolved that he would walk the whole way if need be.

In the taproom, he downed a mug of tea, declining a larger breakfast so as to save shillings and hasten their departure.