reported home on the need of more men. Now he had less
than a thousand regulars to defend the whole country:
and not another man was to arrive till the spring of next
year. When Gage was hard pressed for reinforcements at
Boston in the autumn of 1774 Carleton had immediately
sent him two excellent battalions that could ill be spared
from Canada. But when Carleton himself made a similar
request, in the autumn of 1775, Admiral Graves, to his
lasting dishonour, refused to sail up to Quebec so late
as October.

The first moves of the three Americans smacked strongly
of a well-staged extravaganza in which the smart Yankees
never failed to score off the dunderheaded British. The
Green Mountain Boys assembled on the east side of the
lake. Spies walked in and out of Ticonderoga, exactly
opposite, and reported to Ethan Allen that the commandant
and his whole garrison of forty unsuspecting men would
make an easy prey. Allen then sent eighty men down to
Skenesborough (now Whitehall) at the southern end of the
lake, to take the tiny post there and bring back boats
for the crossing on the 10th of May. Then Arnold turned
up with his colonel's commission, but without the four
hundred men it authorized him to raise. Allen, however,
had made himself a colonel too, with Warner as his
second-in-command. So there were no less than three
colonels for two hundred and thirty men. Arnold claimed
the command by virtue of his Massachusetts commission.
But the Green Mountain Boys declared they would follow
no colonels but their own; and so Arnold, after being