The meeting which Peter Cartwright was to hold had been heralded far and wide, and it was expected that several thousand people would attend. A great arbor had been erected at each of the four corners of which was a high wooden altar covered with earth and sod where pine torches burned to illuminate the darkness. A platform large enough to hold twenty preachers had been built, with an open space in front scattered with straw and lined with mourners' benches. Back from the arbor a circle of tents was placed; back of the tents, wagons, buggies, and carts of every description; and back of this rim of vehicles the horses, and sometimes oxen, were tethered. The gathering together of so many people from far and near for a period of two or three weeks offered an opportunity for profit-making, and at a previous meeting whiskey as well as cider and tobacco had been sold in the forest beyond the camp-clearing, and wheels of chance had been operated, all of which had had a bad effect on the meeting. The Clary Grove boys, after a report from Lincoln, had decided to "give Old Pete right of way," and planned neither mischief nor profit-making. Not so, however, the Wolf Creek and Sand Town gangs; some among these had decided to use the occasion for money-making, and the day before the meeting was to open several barrels of whiskey were discovered in the brush down beyond the camp-arbor. Cartwright immediately sent out word that no whiskey-selling would be allowed anywhere near the meeting-ground, and to the end of discovering whom he must fight, he disguised himself and was thus able to locate the gang of rowdies whose head-quarters he found a short distance down a little creek running by the camp ground. Close to the arbor was a steep bank, below which the water was quite deep. Into this pool, Peter Cartwright learned, a plan had been made to throw him. The rowdies were then to ride through the arbor on horses and, with screeches and yells like those of Indians break up the meeting. With this information in hand, Peter Cartwright prepared himself, and, armed with a stout hickory club, he hid at the narrow passage through which the horsemen were to come, a pathway around the high bank just above the deep pool. The singing service which preceded the sermon, led by the ten exhorters up at the arbor, was swelling into an inspiring volume when Cartwright, hiding in the gloom, heard the sound of horses, and the next moment the leader of the Wolf Creek gang appeared, making his smiling way, with his eye fixed on the arbor. It was at this time the music of the pious song was pierced by an unearthly screech, ending with the words, "In the name of the Lord, GET BACK!" The horse was the first to heed the exhorter's summary order. Pitching his rider off perilously close to the brink of the creek, he snorted away into the forest.