"Simply, that by fraud and force you have won a poor victory over a single man. Use that victory as you please, Montrose, but abuse it not."
"Nay, nay, I shall use it justly, as I am entitled to do; for you know that you have long been a doomed felon, on whose head a price has been set."
"By whom?" asked MacGregor, disdainfully.
"The king and government."
"A German usurper and Scottish traitors like yourself!" replied the other furiously.
"Ha!—it matters not how you name them; you are nevertheless a foredoomed felon, and as such shall you die!"
"And who caused me to be stigmatized as such—who but you? Silence! Duke of Montrose, and lead me where you will; but be silent, I say. Honour is like fine steel—breathe upon it and the surface becomes stained. Sorely have you striven to stain the honour of Rob Roy; but you have striven in vain; for Rob will be remembered among these green mountains and in the hearts of the Gael—look down, O Heaven, and bless them!—when you, duke so venal and corrupt, will be remembered only as the enemy and oppressor of him you would destroy."
"Egad, I like your spirit, MacGregor!" said Colonel Grahame, as he sheathed his sword with an emphatic jerk.
"My spirit may break, Colonel Grahame, but never shall it bend," replied Rob Roy; "I may have my faults like other men, but if the best of us had these written on his forehead, he would, as the saw hath it, pull his bonnet well over his eyes. Till your chief made himself my enemy, I was a quiet, a peaceful, and a God-fearing man; but he made desolate my hearth and home; he seized my patrimony, and cast me forth into the world a broken man, an outlaw, and a beggar, with a price upon my head, to be hunted like a wild beast by soldiers and militia, horse and foot—I, a Highland gentleman, whose lineage was equal, if not superior to his own. But as Fingal said to Swaran, 'The desert is enough for me, with all its deer and echoing woods!' so I took my target and claymore, and retired to the steep mountain and the wild forest, with my good wife and my little ones. Since then, all we have endured has been enough to summon all the spirits of the Clan Alpine who have suffered and died since the field of Glenfruin, back from blessed heaven to the vengeance of earth!"
"Let their spirits come," said the duke, with fierce irony; "see if they will avail much, when you swing by the neck in the Broad Wynd of Stirling, even as Alaster of Glenstrae swung after his fine day's work at Glenfruin."