As Mr. Allen went to his own store, he had passed that of Mr. Manning, to whom he shouted his warning concerning the robbers. Up to this time Manning had no suspicion of what was going on. One of the robbers had been in the store in the forenoon, looking about and pretending he wanted to buy a gun. He was a genteel, well-dressed fellow, and Manning supposed him to be some stranger who had come to Northfield to hunt; though he did not believe that he wanted any gun, and thought there was something wrong about him. Even when the three horsemen dashed through the Square so noisily and belligerently, he thought little of it. But when he heard Allen’s shout, and made out the words “Robbing the Bank,” he recalled what he had seen and the meaning of it all flashed upon his mind. Abruptly leaving the customer he was serving, he rushed for a weapon, thinking hard and fast. Pistols? No, they would be of little account, His shotgun? Yes—No; he had left all his loaded cartridges at home. His breach-loading rifle! That was the thing; and here it was in the window; and there in a pigeon-hole of his desk were the cartridges, where they had been carelessly thrown months before. All this came to him without an instant’s loss of time. He forgot nothing and he made no mistakes. Stripping the rifle of its cover, and seizing a handful of cartridges, he hurried to the scene of battle, loading as he ran. The scene on the street is indescribable. People had not only made haste to get out of the way of the leaden hail-storm that had burst forth, but had also taken measures to protect themselves and their property against the raiders, whose intention was believed to be not only to rob the bank but to pillage the entire town. Stores and offices were hastily closed. The postmaster, Capt. H. S. French, who chanced to have an exceptionally heavy registered mail on hand that day, hastened to lock it in the safe and close the Office. Jewelers and others who had valuable and portable stock pursued a similar course. The news of the invasion, emphasized by the sound of the shooting, spread swiftly through the town. Warning was sent to the public school and to Carleton College to keep the students off the streets. The general impression was that the town was in possession of a horde of robbers, numbering nobody knew how many, and coming nobody knew whence, and bent on ruthless plunder, nobody knew to what extent.