Ethan Allen and Seth Warner then mustered a force of sixty Green Mountain Boys, and set forth for Otter Creek. Arriving there after a march of four days, they at once set about dispossessing the Scotchmen and their families, burned their houses after their effects had been removed, and destroyed their corn by turning their horses loose in the fields. Allen's party was joined next morning by Remember Baker, with a force nearly as large, when they completed the work of destruction by tearing down the mill, breaking the millstones past all mending, and throwing the pieces into the river. With his sword Baker cut the bolt-cloth into pieces, which he distributed among his men to wear in their hats as cockades. When the sturdy miller, John Cameron, demanded by what authority or law he and his men committed such acts, Baker answered, "We live out of the bounds of the law," and, holding up his gun, said, "This is my law."[49] Cameron told him that with twenty good men he would have undertaken to defend his house and mill, though there were a hundred and ten of them, and was answered that he and his countrymen were all for the broadsword, but they were for bush fighting! Perhaps it was in admiration of his brave Scotch spirit that they offered him a gift of land if he would join them, an offer which he rejected, while it may be that Donald McIntosh, who had fought at Culloden and under Wolfe at Quebec, at least took the proposal into canny consideration, for his house was not molested, nor he forced to leave it. Cameron deposed that he was informed some three weeks later by one Irwin, who lived on the east shore of the lake not far from Crown Point, that Baker and eight others had lain in wait a whole day near the mouth of Otter Creek, with the intention of murdering Colonel Reid and his boat's company on their way to Crown Point, and would have done so, had not Reid departed a day sooner than expected. The story seems unlikely, as the Green Mountain Boys, who had come so far to enforce their laws of the green wood, could have had no means of gaining information of Colonel Reid's intended movements, even had they desired to take his life. They retaliated with hard and unrelenting hand the oppressive acts and the encroachments of New York, but never, though the opportunities were frequent and the chances of retribution few, did they, in all the course of this bitter feud, take the life of one of their opponents,[50] even when their leaders were outlawed and a price set upon their heads. Having destroyed six houses, the mill, and most of the growing and harvested crops, the "Bennington Mob" departed from the desolated settlement, Thompson says to build a block-house at the lower falls of the Winooski, to prevent the intrusion of New York claimants there, but it was not reported to the New York government that such fortifications had been built at that place and at Otter Creek till September of the next year.