Chapter XXIV: Will He Escape?

The Duke of Athole immediately wrote to Lieutenant-General Carpenter, who had succeeded John, Duke of Argyle and Greenwich, as Commander-in-Chief in Scotland (the general was also Governor of Minorca), informing him that he had "captured Robert MacGregor Campbell, the famous outlaw and rebel, for whose apprehension a large sum had been so long offered by the authorities."

He requested the general to send from Edinburgh a body of troops to escort the prisoner to that city, and, in compliance with his wish, a troop of Lord Polwarth's Scottish Light Horse (now the 7th Hussars), marched so far as Kinross.

Meanwhile, the unfortunate MacGregor was kept a close prisoner, manacled with cords, and guarded day and night by the vassals of the duke, and a party of Captain MacDougal's Horse Grenadiers, whom he had obtained from the officer commanding in Perth.

In a short time it was known all over Scotland that Rob Roy was a captive; but the mode of his capture, and the foul treachery which characterized it, covered Athole with disgrace, though he seems to have felt no small vanity at the success of his snare, if we may judge from a letter which he wrote to John, Duke of Roxburgh, who was Secretary of State for North Britain, minutely detailing the affair.

Panting for freedom and for vengeance, both of which were justly his, Rob Roy was kept under the military escort at a place called Logierait, which lies eight miles north of Dunkeld; there he had been conveyed after his capture in the castle of Blair.

It was a dark and boisterous night when the troops began their march from the latter place, with the prisoner still bound and tied to a horse; a horse grenadier with his unslung carbine riding on each side of him. The clouds were driven in black masses along the summits of Ben-ghlo and Cairn-na-Gabar (or the mountain of the goats), and the roaring wind rolled over the thick old forests of Blair Athole, bowing the trees till their masses seemed to heave like the waves of the sea, in the fitful gleams of the moon. On halting at Logierait, the duke ordered MacGregor to be kept there securely, until a properly-mounted escort of his own people was in readiness to convey him to Edinburgh. The duke was resolved that the whole merit of the capture should remain with himself, and that even the king's troops should not share it.

But this vanity proved in the end his own defeat.

Rob Roy, on finding himself in one of the miserable cottages of the village, began to hope that he might perhaps achieve an escape. As a preliminary, he begged the sergeant who commanded the troopers, to undo the cords which bound his hands, that he might write a farewell letter to his unhappy wife, who had then found shelter in the little farmhouse of Portnellan, at the head of Loch Katrine.

The sergeant was a humane man; he said something about his own wife and little ones who were far away in old Ireland, and he did as Rob requested, though in defiance of express orders.

Then, as he had been liberal in supplying the soldiers with whisky and ale, they became friendly with MacGregor, and so, after a time, the letter was written; but there was a difficulty in procuring a messenger to Loch Katrine, as several MacGregors had located themselves thereabout, and reprisals were dreaded.

The stormy night wore on, and ere long all the soldiers were sleeping, save one, who stood with his loaded carbine at the door of the cottage.

To MacGregor it seemed as if this man pitied him, as he had been more gentle than his comrades, and had ministered to his comfort, so far as he dared, since the time of his betrayal at Blair.

Being strong, active, and wiry as a mountain stag, to rush on this trooper and wrench away his carbine would have been an easy task to MacGregor, but the key of the cottage door hung at the waist-belt of the sleeping sergeant; thus the preliminary scuffle would only serve to rouse the whole party, and ensure his being shot down by some of them.

As these ideas occurred to the captive, he surveyed the sentinel, whose gaze was never turned from him. With a swarthy, almost olive-tinted face, and deep, dark eyes, he was a stout and handsome young man; and his profusely-braided uniform, with its heavy red cuffs, his Horse Grenadier cap, and tasselled boots, became him well. He had his right hand on the lock of his carbine, the barrel of which rested in the hollow of his left arm.

"How goes the night?" asked MacGregor.

"Twelve has just struck on the kirk clock without," replied the soldier; "and the night is wild and eerie yet. You can hear the sough of the wind among the trees, and the roar of the Tay, too."

"You are, I think, a south-country man, by your accent," said MacGregor.

"Yes," replied the trooper, drily, as he was loth to become too familiar with a prisoner of a character so formidable, and, moreover, the sergeant might be awake.

"Take another taste of the whisky, man: there is a drop in the quaich yet. What part of the south are you from?"

The trooper drained the little wooden cup, and replied--

"I come from Moffatdale; my auld mother bydes in a bit thatched housie at Cragieburnwood. Weary fall the day I ever left it to become a soldier!"

"Moffatdale," said Rob, ponderingly; "many a good drove of short-legged Argyleshires I have had driven through it to the southern markets at Carlisle and Penrith. I know well the place, the Hartfell----"

"And Queensbury Hill, Loch Skene, and the Greymare's Tail, and Yarrow wi' a' its dowie dens!" added the soldier, with kindling eyes.

"Once when there I fought some militiamen, and gave them good cause to remember Rob Roy; though perhaps the loons knew not my name."

"When was this?" asked the soldier, earnestly.

"A year or so after the Union. It was in a summer gloaming, when I was riding northward near Moffat village, I heard the cries of a woman in anguish. They came from a deep, dark hollow called the Gartpool Linn----"

"Weel ken I the place," said the soldier.

"A true Highlander has ever his sword at the service of a friend, or the defenceless. I rode into the dark dingle, and found some rascally militiamen, with a queen's officer, about to hang some unfortunate gipsies; but, by my faith! I gave them their kail through the reek. I threw one half of them into the water, drove off the rest, and passed two feet of my claymore through the body of the officer, who must have been a tough fellow, for he seemed never a bit the worse when I saw him last at the field of Sheriffmuir. I cut down the poor gipsies, who hung on the lower branch of a tree, but they were dead----"

"All?"

"All, except one--a boy about the age of Coll--my own boy Coll, whom I may never see again; in this world, at least," added MacGregor, with a burst of emotion.

The soldier, who had listened to this anecdote with deep interest, said,--

"You did more, MacGregor; you gave some money to the poor harmless lassie that lay at the foot of the tree--money to comfort her ere you went away."

"Yes, perhaps I did; but how know you that?"

"She was my sister, and I am the half-hanged gipsy lad whom you saved, MacGregor."

"You!" exclaimed the other, with astonishment in his tone.

"Yes," said the soldier, giving his hand to the outlaw; "I enlisted in Polwarth's Light Horse after that, and have smelt powder at Ramillies, at Oudenarde, and Malplacquet. Then I became a Horse Grenadier. Oh! MacGregor, what can I do to serve and thank you for the brave deed of that doleful summer evening?"

"Get me a messenger," said MacGregor, huskily; "one who will take this letter to my poor forlorn wife."

"I shall," replied the soldier, in a whisper, as he glanced uneasily at his sleeping comrades; "and I shall do more; the best horse in the troop shall be at your service before the day dawns if another cannot be had!"

"Say you so?" exclaimed MacGregor, whose heart leaped with joy.

"Yes, so sure as my name is Willie Gemmil, even if I should be shot for it at the drumhead."

"I thank you,--I thank you! my wife, my bairns!" said Rob, in a broken voice. "You know, soldier, what I have been--think of what I am. I have much of goodness, of kindness, of charity, of love in my heart; yet men deem me a savage, and seek to make me one. It may be that in my desperation and fury, when fired by the sense of unmerited wrong, I have done severe things; but the memory of the station I have lost, and of the success I once hoped to achieve, add deeper bitterness to my fallen fortunes now. 'Tis well that old Donald of Glengyle is in his grave, and knows not the fate of his son!"

When day broke, Gemmil was relieved from his post, and exerted himself to procure a messenger, with a fleet and active horse.

On the man coming to the door of the cottage, having been instructed by the gipsy trooper what to do, he dismounted at the moment that Rob Roy, with the sergeant's permission, came forth to give the letter and some special message to Helen MacGregor.

Rob's emotion was great on recognizing in the messenger who had volunteered so readily, his foster-brother MacAleister, who had been hovering about Logierait in the hope of achieving something; but beyond a keen, quick glance nothing passed between them; but that glance contained a volume.

The eyes of the whole troop were upon Rob, yet he sprang past them, leaped into the empty saddle of the messenger's horse, and urged it at full speed towards the bank of the Tay.

"Boot and saddle! To horse and after him!" exclaimed the sergeant, while a scattered volley of carbine bullets whistled after MacGregor; but long before the troop horses were bitted and saddled, he had plunged into the foaming river, crossed it, and disappeared.

The vexation and chagrin of the Duke of Athole were extreme, when about an hour after this occurrence he arrived with a band of his own retainers, all well mounted and armed with swords and musketoons, to escort the prisoner to Edinburgh, and found no trace of him but the letter he had written to Helen, and the cords with which he had been so ignominiously bound.

For a time the fortification and garrison of Inversnaid were a complete check upon the projects of Rob Roy; but he resolved ere long to capture the works and expel the soldiers.

Though of small value in some respects, his lands had been sufficient, in those frugal days, for the maintenance of his family and dependants; and, as his ancestral rocks and hills, he loved them dearly. "It is felt as a strange and uncouth association (to quote the "Domestic Annals of Scotland"), that Steele, of _Tatler_ and _Spectator_ memory--kind-hearted, thoughtless Dicky Steele--should have been one of the persons who administered in the affairs of the cateran of Craigrostan. In the final report of the Commissioners (for forfeited estates) we have the pitiful account of _the public ruin of poor Rob_, Inversnaid being described as of the yearly value of £53. 16s. 8½d., and the total sum realized from it, of purchase-money and interest, £958. 18s. There is much possible reason to believe that it would have been a much more advantageous, as well as humane arrangement, for the public to have allowed these twelve miles of Highland mountains to remain in the hands of their former owner."

In the close of the year he went with Greumoch, MacAleister, and a few other followers to the ducal castle of Inverary, and there affected to submit to the Government, by delivering some forty or fifty swords and pistols to his remote kinsman, Colonel Patrick Campbell, of Finab; from whom he obtained a signed protection; after this act, which was performed merely _to gain time_, he could not be molested by the troops or civil authorities.

But he returned to Breadalbane more than ever determined to exert every energy in storming the fortress of Inversnaid, in expelling the garrison, and resolved to spend the last of his life in punishing Montrose, Athole, Killearn, and all who had ever wronged or injured him.

We shall soon see the sequel to these bold projects.