The crowd strained forward in the Queen Street courtroom on October 17, 1770. Murmurs and rumblings of anger filled the air. Captain Thomas Preston, a British grenadier, shifted his feet nervously and felt the sweat rising to his brow. If the jury found him, and his men, guilty of murder as the indictment suggested, he could only expect death as a penalty. That is what these Bostonians wanted! The only hope for Preston and his men lay with this short, stocky country lawyer—a colonial American after all—John Adams, and his too young assistant Josiah Quincy.