Meanwhile three Americans were plotting an attack along the old line of Lake Champlain.  Two of them were outlaws from the colony of New York, which was then disputing with the neighbouring colony of New Hampshire the possession of the lawless region in which all three had taken refuge and which afterwards became Vermont.  Ethan Allen, the gigantic leader of the wild Green Mountain Boys, had a price on his head.  Seth Warner, his assistant, was an outlaw of a somewhat humbler kind.  Benedict Arnold, the third invader, came from Connecticut.  He was a horse-dealer carrying on business with Quebec and Montreal as well as the West Indies.  He was just thirty-four; an excellent rider, a dead shot, a very fair sailor, and captain of a crack militia company.  Immediately after the affair at Lexington he had turned out his company, reinforced by undergraduates from Yale, had seized the New Haven powder magazine and marched over to Cambridge, where the Massachusetts Committeemen took such a fancy to him that they made him a colonel on the spot, with full authority to raise men for an immediate attack on Ticonderoga.  The opportunity seemed too good to be lost; though the Continental Congress was not then in favour of attacking Canada, as its members hoped to see the Canadians throw off the yoke of empire on their own account.  The British posts on Lake Champlain were absurdly undermanned.  Ticonderoga contained two hundred cannon, but only forty men, none of whom expected an attack.  Crown Point had only a sergeant and a dozen men to watch its hundred and thirteen pieces.  Fort George, at the head of Lake George, was no better off; and nothing more had been done to man the fortifications at St Johns on the Richelieu, where there was an excellent sloop as well as many cannon in charge of the usual sergeant’s guard.  This want of preparation was no fault of Carleton’s.  He had frequently 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