he came to the bridge in Concord town."

Revere's account reads:--

"We had got nearly half way; Mr. Dawes and the Doctor stopped to alarm
the people of a house. I was about one hundred rods ahead when I saw
two men, in nearly the same situation as those officers were near
Charlestown. I called for the Doctor and Dawes to come up; in an
instant I was surrounded by four.... We tried to get out there; the
Doctor jumped his horse over a low stone wall and got to Concord. I
observed a wood at a small distance and made for that. When I got
there, out rushed six officers on horseback and ordered me to
dismount."]

"Tell us where we can find those arch traitors to his majesty the
king, or you are dead men," the threat of an officer.

Paul Revere sees the muzzle of the pistol within a foot of his breast,
but it does not frighten him.

"Ah, gentlemen, you have missed your aim."

"What aim?"

"You won't get what you came for. I left Boston an hour before your
troops were ready to cross Charles River. Messengers left before me,
and the alarm will soon be fifty miles away. Had I not known it, I
would have risked a shot from you before allowing myself to be
captured."

From the belfry of the meetinghouse the bell was sending its peals
far and wide over fields and woodlands.

"Do you not hear it? The town is alarmed," said Revere.

"Rub-a-dub-dub! rub-a-dub-dub! rub-a-dub, rub-a-dub, rub-a-dub-dub!"
It was the drummer beating the long roll.

"The minute-men are forming; you are dead men!" said Dawes.

The drumbeat, with the clanging bell, was breaking the stillness of
the early morning. The officers put their heads together and whispered
a moment.

"Get off your horses," ordered Captain Parsons of the king's Tenth
Regiment.

Revere and Dawes obeyed.

"We'll keep this; the other is only fit for the crows to pick," said
one of the officers, cutting the saddle-girth of Dawes's horse,
turning it loose, and mounting Bucephalus. Then all rode away, dashing
past the minute-men on Lexington Green.

"The minute-men are forming,--three hundred of them," reported the
officers to Colonel Smith, who was marching up the road.[58]

[Footnote 58: "We heard there were some hundreds of people collected
there, intending to oppose us and stop our going out. At five o'clock
we arrived there, and a number of people, I believe between two and
three hundred, formed on a common in the middle of the town." "Diary
of a British Officer,"