“No chaffing about this not being true,” said Ethan, “we haven’t the time for it. Eph wakened me up at two o’clock this morning with a handful of gravel on my window, and I was over at Smith’s hill before daylight, and I found the crowbars rammed up a hollow tree just as he told me, and the gun is there by the roadside, tipped over in a kind of gully, and there is some gravel on top of it, and a pile of dry brushwood, so that any one driving along the road would not notice it, and I fished the ramrod and old Basset’s traces out of the brook. I reckon the Ogden boys are coming over for the gun to-night, and we want to get in ahead of them. I can go, for one. Who else?” “Me, too,” piped in little Eph. “Oh, of course,” said Ethan. “Me, three--that makes six,” said Martin. “I will go,” said Seneca Goodyear in his slow, heavy way, “and I reckon that father will let me have a team--our horses won’t have to work to-morrow.” “Will your father make you tell what you are going to do with it?” asked the conservative boy. “Well, no--not if I had rather not,” said Seneca. “He’ll trust me--and that is the tightest tether I want to be fastened with. Sometimes I wish he didn’t. I wouldn’t like to get home minus the traces and linchpin and crowbars as Phil Basset did.” “Well, if Seneca goes, that takes me,” said Mark Hemingway, the tall doorkeeper. “My folks said I might stay all night with Seneca and I shall stick like a tick.” “I’ll go, and I, and I,” chorused the rest--conservative boy and all. Then Seneca Goodyear moved that Ethan Allan be captain of the expedition. This was carried by acclaim. “All right,” said Ethan in terse acceptance of the appointment. “Now we’ve got to be quicker than lightning and darker than thunder. We don’t want the Ogden boys to get there ahead of us, and have to fight them. No more we don’t want our folks stopping us nor helping us out as if we were babies. We want the glory of this ourselves. Quick and quiet is the word. All scatter and get ready and we’ll meet at the cross-roads and start when the town clock strikes nine.” The company at the cross-roads organized as follows: Ethan Allen, captain. Eph Stearns, with the court-house mule, mounted scout. Martin Fox, with a dark lantern, spy and light skirmisher. Mark Hemingway, with an old triggerless flintlock of 1812, high private. The rank and file consisted of two boys with pistols and no cartridges, and three boys with doughnuts and sweet apples, while the conservative boy with a pocket-compass, a lead pencil, some string, and a chunk of shoemaker’s wax, put in a bid as topographer, correspondent, and surgeon. But Seneca Goodyear, with his stout team and wagon, well equipped with ropes, crowbars, skids, and other lifting apparatus, was the mainstay of the expedition.