Allen had just left Castleton when Benedict Arnold arrived there, and demanded the command of the expedition by authority of a colonel's commission just received from the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, with orders to raise 400 men for the reduction of Ticonderoga. The committee in charge of the enterprise, in consideration of the conditions under which the men had engaged, refused to give him the command. But he persisted in demanding it, and at once set forward to overtake Allen, whom he found no more disposed to yield to his demand than the committee had been, nor would his men consent to follow another leader. Upon this, Arnold joined the force as a volunteer. By the evening of the 9th, 270 men, all but forty of whom were Green Mountain Boys, had assembled on the shore of the little creek in Shoreham now known as Hand's Cove, which is in summer a level expanse of sedgy marsh threaded by a narrow sluggish channel, but during the spring floods is a broad cove of the lake, its waters over-running the roots of the trees that grow upon the banks. Here the force anxiously awaited transportation, for the seemingly well-laid plans for securing boats had not proved successful. It was not till near morning that the watchers, often deceived by the cries of strange waterfowl, the sudden plunge of the muskrat, or his long wake gleaming in the light of the camp-fires, at last heard the unmistakable splash of oars, and saw the boats coming in among buttressed trunks of the great elms and water-maples that stood ankle-deep in the spring flood. When scows, skiffs, dugouts, and yawls had crushed through the drift of dead waterweeds and made a landing, it was found that there were not enough of the motley craft collected to transport half the force. Allen, Easton, Arnold, and eighty others at once embarked, and, crossing the lake, landed a little north of Willow Point, on the New York shore, when the boats returned to bring over those who, under Warner, remained at the cove. Day was now dawning, the rugged horizon line of forest and mountain becoming each moment more distinct against the eastern sky, and it became evident that, if the attack was much longer delayed, there would be no chance of surprising the garrison.