At midnight the men repaired to quarters from the farms and drinking-houses whereat they had been scattered. At two, they began their march, struggling against a biting wind, their faces stung by the snow horizontally driven, the locks of their guns held under the lappets of their coats to avoid being wetted by the snow. Old Tom and the other riflemen were in their usual place in Arnold's division, which was to enter the lower town at its narrow northern end, passing between the promontory's foot and the frozen St. Charles River. Through the suburb and streets of St. Roque, they breasted the snowy darkness; first went Arnold, at the head of a forlorn hope of twenty-five men, one hundred yards before the main body; then Captain Lamb and his artillery company, drawing a field-piece on a sledge; next, a company with ladders and other scaling implements; then, Morgan and his company, heading the riflemen; next, the Lancaster company, led, in Captain Smith's absence, by Steele; then the Cumberland County men, with their own captain, for Hendricks, though the command of the guard that morning belonged to him, had got leave to take part in the attack; and last, the New England troops. The division would have first to pass a battery on a wharf, which the field-piece was to attack and the forlorn hope scale with ladders, while Morgan should lead the riflemen around the wharf on the ice. Old Tom plodded not far behind Hendricks, the men straggling onward in single file. As they approached the houses below Palace Gate, which led from the upper town on their right, there suddenly burst forth a thunder of cannon, which mingled soon with the alarming clang of all the bells in the city. "They've spied our intentions," muttered old Tom to the man ahead, and strode on. Presently muskets blazed from the ramparts above. Men began to drop here and there and to writhe in the snow, but their comrades hurried over or around them. Hendricks's soldiers could not see far ahead, for the darkness and the blinding snow; nor could they always make out the path left by Arnold, Lamb, and the riflemen in advance. They could see nothing of the foe save the flashes of the muskets from the walls crowning the ascent at their right. Presently they became aware of some kind of stoppage ahead; it was made by the artillerymen, whose field-piece had stuck hopelessly in a snowdrift. The company with the scaling-ladders made as if to stop also; but Morgan was at their heels, forcing them forward, hastening on his own company, and swearing terribly in a voice that rivalled the tumult of bells and cannon. So the riflemen, preceded by the ladder-bearers, passed on through the opening made for them by the artillery company.