three o'clock
The intense vitality of the atmosphere communicated itself to the nerves , stringing them like steel chords , and setting them vibrating with lust for action , reckless , daring emprise . The plan which Perez had formed for forestalling his adversaries and visiting upon their own heads the fate they had prepared for him , was very simple . He proposed to go down into the village with Abe and Lu and with their assistance , to call up , without waking anybody else , some forty or fifty of the most determined fellows of the rebel party . With the aid of these , he intended as noiselessly as possible , to enter the houses of Woodbridge , Edwards , Deacon Nash , Captain Stoddard and others , and arrest them in their beds , simultaneously seizing the town stock of muskets and powder , and conveying it to a guarded place , so that when the conspirators ' party assembled at three o'clock , they might find themselves at once without arms or officers , their leaders hostages in the hands of the enemy , and their design completely set at naught . Thanks to the excesses of the past week or two , there were many more than forty men in the village who , knowing that the restoration of law and order meant a sharp reckoning for them , would stop at nothing to prevent it , and Perez could thus command precisely the sort of followers he wanted for his present undertaking . For generations after , in certain Stockbridge households , the story in grandmother 's repertoire most eagerly called by the young folks on winter evenings , was about how the `` Regulators '' came for grandpa ; how at dead of night the heavy tramp of men and the sound of rough voices in the rooms below , awoke the children sleeping overhead and froze their young blood with fear of Indians ; how at last mustering courage , they crept downstairs , and peeking into the living-room saw it full of fierce men , with green boughs in their hats , the flaring candles gleaming upon their muskets and bayonets , and the drawn sword of their captain ; while in the midst , half-dressed and in his nightcap , grandpa was being hustled about . Leaving these details to the imagination , suffice it to say that Perez ' plan , clearly-conceived and executed with prompt , relentless vigor , was perfectly successful , and so noiselessly carried out , that excepting those families whose heads were arrested by the soldiers , the village as a whole , had no suspicion that anything in particular was going on , until waking up the next morning , the people found squads of armed men on guard at the street corners , and sentinels pacing up and down before the Fennell house , that building left vacant by Gleason 's ejection , having been selected by Perez for the storage of his prisoners and the stores he had confiscated .