"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.