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.
CHAPTER XXV.
LITTLE RONALD.
About this time there occurred two circumstances, which—more than any outrage that had preceded them—impelled Rob to attack the Sassenach invaders, for so he deemed them at Inversnaid.
Near Eas-teivil, or the Fall of the Tummel, in the face of a tremendous rock, is a cavern to which there is a narrow path, accessible only to one person at a time. Therein several fugitive MacGregors were surprised by some of Huske's soldiers, who had been conducted there by a spy named MacLaren. One-half were shot down or bayonneted. The others fought their way out, but fell over the rock, and clung to the trees which grew from its face.
There they swung in blind desperation above the foaming stream, "upon which," says the "Statistical Reporter," "the pursuers cut off their arms, and precipitated them to the bottom," to be swept away by the rushing water.
These tidings filled Rob Roy with a glow of fury, which the second event was in no way calculated to cool.
It chanced that on a day in spring, his second son, Ronald, a boy in his fourteenth year, despite the intreaties of his mother, and the injunctions of his father, strolled over the hills with his fishing-rod, along the banks of Loch Arclet, and actually fished within sight of Inversnaid.
Little Ronald was brave as a lion. Once he had climbed the giddiest of the rocks above Loch Lomond, with his dirk in his teeth, to destroy the nest of a gigantic iolar or mountain eagle, which preyed on the lambs of a poor widow who was his foster-mother.