In their rage and sorrow for what had occurred, his wife and daughter besought him to yield the fugitive to the clansmen, that they might put him to death; but Glenstrae stood over him with his sword drawn, and said,—
"Let no man here dare to lay a hand upon him! MacGregor has promised him safety, and by the soul of my only and beloved son, whom he has slain, he shall be safe while under the roof of Glenstrae—safe as if beneath his own!"
And before the interment of Evan, when the sorrow and the angry passions of the assembled clan would be roused to their full height, the chief, with a chosen party, escorted young Lamond far across the mountains, and almost to within sight of his home in Cowal.
"Farewell, Lamond," said he, gravely and sternly; "on your own land you are now safe. Farther I will not and cannot protect you. Avoid my people, lest your father may have to endure the sorrow that wrings this heart of mine; and may God forgive you the woe you have brought on the house of Glenstrae!"
In a few years after this, the Field of Glenfruin was fought; the castle of Stronmiolchoin was destroyed, and Master of Glenstrae, then an aged man, and all his people were proscribed fugitives.
Homeless, nameless, and a wanderer, with the severe parliamentary acts of James VI. hanging over his head, the laird of Glenstrae had to lurk in the caves and woods among the glens that had once been his own, till he was captured by Sir James Campbell of Ardkinlass, from whom ne made an escape, and fled to Cowal, a peninsula of Argyle, that stretches far into the Firth of Clyde.
Here the young laird of Lamond found the poor old man, and received and protected him in his house, with many other fugitives of the Clan Gregor, saving them from Archibald Earl of Argyle and other powerful enemies.
To the earl, Glenstrae at last yielded himself, on the solemn promise that he should be sent out of Scottish ground—a promise which was truly but fearfully kept!
He was marched as far as the English side of Berwick, under an escort of the Scottish Horse Guard, commanded by David Murray, Lord Scone, and then brought back to Edinburgh, where, with eighteen devoted men of his surname, he was hanged on the 20th of January, 1604.
"Being a chief," says Birrel, "he was hanged his own height above the rest of his friends."