face of the inn, even with the second story
windows, the ladies of the town sat and viewed the maneuvres of the
newly formed train-band. Before the door stood the twenty-five foot post
that held the sign and was likewise capped by a stuffed catamount, in a
very lifelike pose, its grinning teeth and extended claws turned toward
the New York border in defiance of "Yorker rule."

The leaders of the party which had suggested these drills--all staunch
Whigs and active in their defiance of the Yorkers,--met together in the
inn that day, too, and laid plans for a campaign against certain
settlers from New York who had come into the Grants and taken up farms
without having paid the New Hampshire authorities for the same. In not
all cases had these New York settlers driven off people who had bought
the land of New Hampshire or her agents; but if it was really the
property of that colony the Yorkers had no right upon the eastern side
of the Twenty-Mile Line, or on that side of the lake, at all. As far
north as the opposite shore from Fort Ticonderoga, that key to the
Canadian route which had been wrested from the French but a few years
before, Yorkers had settled; and the Green Mountain Boys determined that
these people must leave the Disputed Ground or suffer for their
temerity.

After the failure of Ten Eyck to capture the Breckenridge farm, New York
began a system of flattery and underhanded methods against the Grants
men which was particularly effective. The Yorkers chose certain more or
less influential individuals and offered them local offices, gifts of
money, and even promised royal titles to some, if they would range
themselves against the Green Mountain Boys. In some cases these offers
were accepted; in this way John Munro had become a justice of the peace,
and Benjamin Hough followed his example. Some foolish folk went so far
as to accept commissions as New York officers, but hoped to hide the
fact from their neighbors until a fitting season--when the Grants were
not afflicted with the presence of the Green Mountain Boys. But in
almost every case such cowardly sycophants were discovered and either
made ridiculous before their neighbors by being tried and hoisted in a
chair before the Catamount Inn, or were sealed with the twigs of the
wilderness--and the Green Mountain Boys wielded the beech wands with no
light hand.

Almost every week the military drills were held in Bennington and Enoch
attended. But before the s