At one of the stopping-places of his former travels he had “felt his patriotism gain force upon the plains of Marathon.” It now took the persistent efforts of three messengers to oust him from a feather bed. Colonel Moodie had lost his life trying to ride through the rebel ranks to do this same service, and Colonel FitzGibbon lost no time in warning all, governor and citizens alike. When Sir Francis was inquired for at Government House at ten o’clock, Mrs. Dalrymple, his sister-in-law, reported that the Governor was fatigued and already asleep. FitzGibbon, restless and disturbed, feeling that he could never sleep again, insisted; and the hero of active service in Spain, the spectator of Waterloo and Quatre Bras, appeared in his dressing-gown, concealed his irritation as best he might, and got back to bed as quickly as possible. “What is all this noise about,” asked Judge Jonas Jones, who also did not like disturbance; “who desired you to call me? Colonel FitzGibbon? The zeal of that man is giving us a great deal of unnecessary trouble.”
About an hour earlier, John Powell, a magistrate who had been busy swearing in special constables, went on horseback with some other volunteers to patrol the northern approaches to the city. At the rise of the Blue Hill Mackenzie and two others were met, the first armed with a large horse pistol, the others with rifles. Powell was not only taken prisoner, but was told “they would let Bond Head know something before long,” that “they had borne tyranny and oppression too long, and were now determined to have a government of their own.” A fellow-prisoner told Powell of the death of Colonel Moodie, put spurs to his horse and managed to escape. Confident that the city’s safety now depended on his own ability to elude his captors, Powell essayed to do the same, but was told by one of them, Anderson, he “would drive a ball through” him. Then followed the incident which has been described as Anderson’s fall from his horse and picked up with neck broken, as “an atrocious murder,” “a victim to Powell’s treachery,” and as a self-deliverance from those whom he believed to be common assassins. When questioned as to his arms he had replied that he had none, a denial refuted shortly afterwards when he drew the pistols given him by a bailiff on leaving the City Hall. Mackenzie had doubted his word, but the statement was repeated. He replied, “Then, gentlemen, as you are my townsmen and men of honour, I should be ashamed to show that I question your word by ordering you to be searched.” Powell, in his account, allows no such quixotic courtesy, and says he heard nothing but mutterings of dissatisfaction. Then, not two feet from Anderson, Powell suddenly reined back his horse, drew a pistol and fired. The shot struck Anderson in the back of his neck; he fell like a sack--the spinal cord was severed and death must have been instantaneous. To wheel about, ride at a breakneck pace, pass Mackenzie himself, hear the latter’s bullet whistle past him, turn in his saddle and snap a pistol at Mackenzie’s face, dismount when he heard the clatter of following hoofs, to hide behind a log, while the pursuer passed, to run down the College Avenue, hugging the shadows as he went, until Government House was reached, brought him where FitzGibbon and others, discomfited, had failed to rouse this phenomenal sleeper. An hour before there had been a moment’s consciousness with the ringing of the Upper Canada College bell by the energetic hand of a youth named John Hillyard Cameron; but on hearing that it was rung by Colonel FitzGibbon’s command, the sleeper, like a marmot, turned over and went to sleep again. Unceremoniously shaking majesty in its nightcap, Powell managed to perform what Sir Francis, in his own account of the affair, calls a sudden awakening. Months before, the Governor had said he awaited the moment when Mackenzie should have “advanced within the short, clumsy clutches of the law,” asking Attorney-General Hagerman to advise him of the moment; he desired to wait until, in the name of law and justice, he could “seize his victim.” A warrant of arrest for Mackenzie on the charge of high treason had so far proved innocuous; now the mountain was obliging enough to come to Mahomet, and Mahomet did not seem inclined to hurry. Next to Bidwell, Mackenzie had most incurred his enmity, they, with “other nameless demagogues,” being the branches of “that plant of cancerous growth, revolution,” to which he would most willingly apply his pruning-knife. And apply it unsparingly he did; but for every twig lopped off he beheld a dozen hardy shoots springing from the wound. Truly the colonial tree was a stubborn growth; no yew or box-clipped fancy, its shaping was beyond his skill.