A messenger was now sent after the dilatory general by Rolph, who, like the mother of Sisera, was sick at heart to know what hindered the wheels of his chariot. The messenger was a young fellow named Henry Hover Wright, one of Rolph’s students, just arrived from Niagara and full of wonder at being met on the wharf by armed men. The only guard he encountered on Yonge Street was one man--rebel--armed with a fusil. Wright passed him, asking why they did not come. The answer was, “We cannot go until General Mackenzie is ready.” The latter at that moment was busy ordering away a new-comer, saying, “I don’t know you, and there are too many friends,” and particularly busy in his endeavour to get dinner and supper for the men. Mounted on a small white horse, from which vantage he incessantly harangued his followers, he told them he would be commander-in-chief as Colonel Van Egmond had not arrived. Van Egmond did not arrive until the Thursday, when Mackenzie, after breakfasting with him, threatened to shoot him.
Expostulating with those who would not advance upon the city in daylight, and exhorting those who had equal objections to the dark, the leader has been variously described: “Storming and swearing like a lunatic, and many of us felt certain he was not in his right senses. He abused and insulted several of the men without any shadow of cause, and Lount had to go round and pacify them by telling them not to pay any attention to him”--(the commander-in-chief)--“as he was not responsible for his actions.” “If we had locked him up in a room at the tavern,” says the naïve chronicler, “and could then have induced Lount to lead us into the city, we should have overturned the government without any fighting worth talking about.” “Once or twice,” says another, “I thought he was going to have a fit.”
No help from outside had as yet arrived in Toronto. After refreshment to the inner rebel had been successfully accomplished by the united efforts of Lount and Mackenzie, the latter’s white mount was exchanged for a big horse taken from some loyalist prisoner. At that juncture had the movement been persevered in, with Lount prominently directing it, there is every reason to suppose that the arms, ammunition and money in the town would have been theirs--also that they would have captured Sir Francis himself, “unless,” indeed, as the _London and Westminster Review_ said, “he had run away.” “All who will reflect on the nature of civil war,” it said, “must see the fearful odds which a day’s success and the possession of the capital and its resources would have given the rebels. For their not obtaining it we have no reason to thank Sir Francis Head.”