On this occasion Rob Roy had four hundred men with him, having left the rest at home under Coll and Red Alaster MacGregor, with orders to keep the pass of Loch Ard against any soldiers whom General Carpenter might send by that route to plunder or destroy.
It was on a lovely day in April when the MacGregors, after a march of more than eighty miles north-west across the mountains from Loch Katrine, guided by a wandering harper named Gillian Ross, from the Isle of the Pigmies, after skirting the vast waste of the braes of Rannoch and the hills of Glenorchy—by ascending the Devil's Staircase, and from thence, passing by the base of the snow-clad Ben Nevis, whose summit was hidden in masses of grey vapour, by Corpach (or the vale of the corpses), by Glen Arkaig and the head of Loch Hourn, halted on the hills of Glensheil, in sight of the dim and distant peaks of the Isle of Skye, and the waves of the Atlantic.
Along the base of the dark mountains which there start abruptly, like masses of blue rock, from the deep salt lochs of the west, wreaths of grey smoke were curling on the wind. These were from the fires of the busy burners of kelp—a manufacture the abolition of which, by the Parliament of 1823, brought ruin and famine upon the poor peasantry of Argyle and Ross.
The weather was mild and warm, though tempered by the breeze from the ocean. The MacGregors encamped on the sheltered side of a mountain slope; a stray cow or so, and the deer of the glens, supplied them with food, which they cooked in the old Scottish fashion, by boiling the flesh in its own skin, or broiling it in fires formed of roots from a morass, or dry branches from the nearest forest.
Every man carried his own oatmeal and hunting-bottle of usquebaugh; and other incumbrance or baggage they had none, save their arms and ammunition.
Little Harry Huske had become hardy now, and slept as snugly in the neuk of Rob's or Greumoch's plaid, as when at home in Portnellan, though he sometimes wept for his mother, as he had learned to call Helen MacGregor.
The third day had been passed on the mountains thus, when a gentleman in tartan trews, with a laced coat and periwig, was seen approaching the camp, mounted on a strong Highland garron.
He and his followers (he had four armed men with him, clad in Highland dresses of the MacKenzie tartan) wore in their bonnets the white cockade, the forbidden badge of the House of Stuart; consequently they were received with acclamations by the MacGregors, though one of the visitors was no other than the redoubtable Duncan nan Creagh, now somewhat bent and older than when we first introduced him to the reader, but active, fierce, and resolute as ever.
On this occasion he acted as guide to Sir James Livingstone, the mounted man in trews.
"Welcome, Sir James," said Rob Roy; "I trust you bring us good tidings of the king and his adherents."