troops, impeded with their wounded, and leaving many of their dying and dead, huddled along the road like sheep beset by dogs. Just on the easterly outskirts of Lexington they met Percy, whose ranks opened and received the fugitives; and Stedman, the British historian who was with Percy, tells us how the weary men hung out their tongues as they cumbered the ground during their halt. It was near two o'clock, and Percy planted his cannon to keep his assailants at bay, while his troops, now about eighteen hundred in number, rested and refreshed themselves. Before this, his baggage train, which had been delayed in crossing the bridge from Brighton to Cambridge so as to fall far behind his hastening column, had been captured, with its guard, by a crowd of old men some distance below, at Menotomy.[371] When Percy limbered his pieces and his troops fell again into column, the hovering militia renewed the assault. As pursuer and pursued crossed West Cambridge plain the action was sharp. Percy did not dare attempt to turn towards the boats which Smith had left at Lechmere Point, and any intention he may have had of halting at Cambridge and fortifying was long vanished. So he pursued the road which led towards Charlestown Neck. Several hundred militiamen, who had come up from Essex County,[372] were nearly in time at Winter Hill to cut the British off in their precipitate retreat, and "God knows", said Washington, when he learned the facts, "it could not have been more so." Percy, however, slipped by, and as darkness was coming on, the fire of the pursuers began to slacken as they approached Bunker Hill. Here, with the royal ships covering their flanks, the British halted, and, facing about, formed a line and prepared to make a stand. General Heath, who during the latter part of the day had been on the ground, drew off his militia, and at the foot of Prospect Hill held the first council of war of the now actual hostilities. Warren, early in the day hastening from Boston across the river, had galloped towards the scene of conflict. When he encountered Percy's column on its way out, he seems to have evaded it and joined General Heath, then taking cross-roads to intercept the pursuing militia. Heath took the command of the provincials soon after Percy resumed his march. From this time Warren, as chairman of the committee in Boston, kept near Heath, for counsel if need be, and Heath says that on the West Cambridge plain a musket-ball struck a pin from Warren's earlock. No one could tell what would happen next, after this suddenly improvised army had begun to rendezvous that night in Cambridge. As the straggling parties, in bivouac and in what shelter they could find, compared experiences and counted the missing, messengers were hurrying in every direction with the tidings of the war at last begun![373]