They marched to within ten rods of the door and halted. In a moment the order was given to fire, and three shots were reluctantly delivered. The order was repeated with curses, which incited the posse to a deadlier volley that killed William French almost outright, fatally wounded Daniel Houghton, and severely injured several others. The assailants then rushed in on the men, who had only clubs to defend themselves with, made several prisoners and took them to the jail. One of these was the dying man, whom "they dragged as one would a dog, and would mock at as he lay gasping," and "did wish there were forty more in the same case." Lying on the jail-room floor, his five wounds undressed, French, not yet twenty-two, died in the early morning of the 14th. Houghton survived his wounds nine days. Thus in a remote frontier town was shed the first blood of the momentous conflict that gave birth to a nation. In the darkness and confusion all the rest of the Whigs escaped, some fighting their way out with their clubs; one, Philip Safford, laying about him so lustily that eight or ten of the sheriff's posse went down beneath the blows of his cudgel. The court party came out of the melee victorious for the present, and without serious injury to any of their number, though in the "State of the Facts," prepared next day by the judges and other officers of the court, two were reported as wounded by pistol shots, which, if indeed so, must have been fired by their friends, for the others declared that they had not so much as a pistol among them, having come with the expectation of gaining their object without violence. Some did now go home for their guns, but did not return to renew the fray. More hastened away to carry the woeful tidings of bloodshed to the Whigs of all the country around, and with such dispatch was this done that, before noon of the next day, two hundred armed men had arrived from New Hampshire. Before night every one known to have been concerned in the killing of French was seized and kept under strong guard. The next day an inquest was held, and a verdict given that French came to his death at the hands of the sheriff, and certain others of his posse. Armed men continued to come from the southern part of the county and from Massachusetts, till by the following morning five hundred "good martial soldiers, well equipped for war," thronged the one street of the little town.