The scene was wild and wintry, the time March, 1775, the place a stretch of woods and fields just back of the famous old town of Concord. The two boys were Phil Warrington and Andy Sabine. The former was on a brief visit to his best friend and chum. Phil's father was a merchant in Boston and Andy's father was a storekeeper in Concord, and the two men were old-time friends. Andy had spent a month in Boston the year previous, and Phil was now returning the visit. The latter had left his home city at a time when loyalty and royalty were beginning a conflict that had already set the country afire. Phil had brought to the excited juveniles of the backwoods town not only the keen, snappy vigor of an all-around intelligent lad nursed by the exhilarating, briny breezes of the Bay, but the grim echo of the gunpowder days. Those were stirring times, and everybody was on the tip-toe of expectation, waiting for something to happen. Phil belonged to a club called the Musket Boys of Boston. Its existence dated back to the day after the famous "tea party," when some Boston citizens, disguised as Indians, resisted the Stamp Act by throwing a whole cargo of English tea into the waters of the Bay. Phil had witnessed that stirring event personally, and that made him an object of interest to every lively, patriotic lad in Concord. Then, too, Phil was one of those boys who had formed themselves into a committee to visit General Gage at the British headquarters in Boston, to complain of his rude royalist soldiers. The soldiers had spoiled the snow slides of the boys on Boston Commons out of malice, taunting them with being "young rebels." Whenever Phil related this incident, he stirred his manly young hearers to deep indignation and patriotic fervor, and they voted him quite the hero that he was. This all led to stir up more deeply the latent spirit of resistance and outbreak long smoldering in the bosoms of the ardent youths of Concord. Their parents talked nothing but war, and were already organizing for the conflict that seemed inevitable. The boys followed their example, and many secret meetings of youthful warriors were held in Andy's barn. They had even drilled like real full-grown soldiers. Phil was the leader in these operations. In fact, he and Andy had just come from target practice with the self-same muskets that they now dropped to the ground as they arose to their feet simultaneously, after curiously watching a boy about their own age who stood at a distance. They had been following some rabbit tracks across the snow when Andy Sabine uttered the remark which opens our story: "That's a queer proceeding, Phil!" It was decidedly an unusual spectacle that the two friends witnessed. About a hundred yards distant the land ran up a small hill. It was covered with light brush, except at the top, where there was a barren space. Here, clearly outlined against the dull grey sky, stood a lad wearing a muskrat skin cap, thinly clad and shivery-looking.