To reach this, they were obliged to pass through Forfar, a town which, being a Calvinistic stronghold, the Chevalier can never mention without an abusive epithet. But here poor Samuel, whose nerves had doubtless been strained by the perpetual watching and waiting of the last few weeks, was frightened out of his senses by the barking of a dog, and tried to throw himself from his horse. At this juncture, Johnstone, who knew that to be left without a guide in this strange place meant certain death, interfered promptly. 'He was continually struggling to get down,' he says,[19] 'but I prevented him by the firm hold I had of his coat. I exhorted him to be quiet; I reproached him; I alternately entreated and menaced him; but all in vain. He no longer knew what he was about, and it was to no purpose I assured him that it was only the barking of a dog. He perspired at every pore, and trembled like a person in an ague. Fortunately I had an excellent horse, and galloped through Forfar at full speed, retaining always fast hold of his coat. As soon as we were fairly out of the town, as no persons had come out of their houses, poor Samuel began to breathe again, and made a thousand apologies for his fears.'
As the day broke and they drew near Broughty Ferry, where Johnstone intended to cross the Firth of Tay, the Chevalier dismounted, and being obliged to part from his horse, offered it as a present to Samuel, who declined the animal from motives of prudence. It was then turned loose in a field (the saddle and bridle being first thrown down a well), and the wayfarers proceeded on their way. Only a few minutes later, they were joined by an acquaintance of Samuel's, who seems to have been of a curious turn of mind, and cross-questioned him as to where he was going and why. Samuel, with more readiness than could have been expected from his recent behaviour, invented a story that sounded plausible enough, explaining Johnstone to be a young man whom he had picked up on the road, and had taken into his service at low wages, owing to his want of a character. The stranger was satisfied, and after a prolonged drink they separated, when Samuel informed Johnstone that the man was one of the 'greatest knaves and cheats in the country,' and that they would assuredly have been betrayed if he had discovered who they were.
They arrived at the Ferry about nine in the morning, and by Samuel's advice, the Chevalier immediately sought the help of Mr. Graham, a gentleman of Jacobite family, then living at Duntroon. After a warm welcome from Mr. Graham, who gave him all the entertainment he could without the knowledge of his servants, a boat was engaged to convey him across the Firth about nine that night. Mr. Graham did not, however, dare to be his guide down to the sea-shore, but gave him careful directions as to his following an old woman who had been provided for this purpose. But all Mr. Graham's precautions would have been useless, had not chance once more favoured the Chevalier. His protectress decided that it would be dangerous to allow him to loiter about the shore while the boat was getting ready for sea, so she told her charge to wait for her on the road on top of the hill, and she would return and fetch him when all was ready. Half an hour passed very slowly: the sun was sinking, and the Chevalier grew impatient. He left the road by which he had been sitting, and lay down in a furrow a few yards off, nearer the brow of the hill, so that he might perceive his guide at the earliest moment. Scarcely had he changed his quarters, than he heard the sound of horses, and peeping cautiously out, 'saw eight or ten horsemen pass in the very place he had just quitted.' No sooner were they out of sight, than the old woman arrived, trembling with fright. 'Ah!' she exclaimed in a transport of joy, 'I did not expect to find you here.' She then explained that the horsemen were English dragoons, and that they had so threatened the boatmen engaged by Mr. Graham that they absolutely refused to fulfil their compact. This was a terrible blow to the Chevalier, but he declined to listen to the old woman's advice and return for shelter to Mr. Graham, and after much persuasion, induced his guide to show him the way to the public-house by the sea-shore. Here he was welcomed by the landlady, whose son had been likewise 'out' with the Prince, but neither her entreaties nor those of the Chevalier could move the boatmen from their resolution. They even resisted the prayers of the landlady's two beautiful daughters, till the girls, disgusted and indignant with such cowardice, offered to row him across themselves.
'We left Broughty Ferry,' he writes in his memoirs, 'at ten o'clock in the evening, and reached the opposite shore about midnight.' He then took an affectionate leave of his preservers, and proceeded, footsore as he was, to walk to St. Andrews. At this time Johnstone seems to have felt more physically exhausted than at almost any other moment of his travels; and it was only by dint of perpetually washing his sore and bleeding feet in the streams he passed, that he managed to reach St. Andrews towards eight o'clock. He at once made his way to the house of his cousin, Mrs. Spence, who, herself a suspected person, was much taken aback by the sight of him, and hastily sent a letter to a tenant farmer living near the town, to provide the fugitive with a horse which would carry him to Wemyss, a seaport town on the way to Edinburgh. The old University city does not appear to have made a favourable impression on the Chevalier. He declares that no town 'ever deserved so much the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah,'[20] and this, not from any particular wickedness on the part of the inhabitants, but because they were supposed to be Calvinists. However, his sentiments must have been confirmed when the farmer declined to take his horses out on a Sunday, and, lame as he was, Johnstone had no choice but to set out on foot for Wemyss. Halfway, he suddenly remembered that close by lived an old servant of his family, married to the gardener of Mr. Beaton, of Balfour. Here he was housed and fed for twenty hours, and then conducted by his host, a rigid Presbyterian, to a tavern at Wemyss, kept by the mother-in-law of the gardener. By her advice they applied to a man named Salmon, who, though a rabid Hanoverian, could be trusted not to betray those who had faith in him. It was hard work to gain over Salmon, who was proof against bribery, but at last it was done. By his recommendation Johnstone was to lie till dawn in a cave near Wemyss (a place whose name means 'caves'), and with the first ray of light was to beg a passage to Leith from some men who were with Salmon part owners of a boat. In this cave, which, notwithstanding its narrow entrance, was deep and spacious, the Chevalier was glad to repose his weary bones. But, after dozing about an hour, he was 'awakened by the most horrible and alarming cries that ever were heard.'[21] His first thought was that Salmon had betrayed him, and he retreated to the interior of the cavern, cocked his pistol, and prepared to sell his life dearly. Soon, however, the swift movements accompanying the noise convinced him that it did not proceed from men, for 'sometimes the object was about my ears, and nearly stunned me, and, in an instant, at a considerable distance. At length I ceased to examine any more this horrible and incomprehensible phenomenon, which made a noise in confusion like that of a number of trumpets and drums, with a mixture of different sounds, altogether unknown to me.'
Effectually aroused by the whining of the owls and bats (for these, of course, were the authors of all this disturbance), Johnstone fixed his eyes on the sea to note the first entrance of the fishing boats into the harbour. He then went down to the shore and began to make the bargain as directed by Salmon, and the fishermen agreed to land him at Leith for half-a-crown. But alas! once more his hopes were blighted. He was in the act of stepping into the boat, when Salmon's wife appeared on the scene, and forbade her husband to go to Leith that day, still less to take a stranger there. Neither Salmon nor Johnstone dared insist, for fear of rousing the woman's suspicions, and after a short retreat in the cave in order to collect his thoughts, he returned to the tavern at Wemyss, to consult with the friendly landlady. Thanks to her, and with the help of one or two people to whom she introduced him, Johnstone at last arrived at the house of one Mr. Seton, whose son had formerly served with Johnstone in the army of the Prince. Here he remained eight days, vainly seeking to find a second man who could aid the fisherman who had already promised to put him across, though it does not appear why Johnstone, who had already observed[22] that he was able to row, did not take an oar when his own head was at stake.
At last affairs were brought to a crisis, by rumours having got abroad of the presence of a fugitive on the coast. Things seemed in a desperate condition, when young Seton threw himself into the breach, and agreed to help Cousselain, the fisherman, to take the Chevalier to Leith. They were actually launching the boat when the inhabitants of the village, alarmed by the noise they made, raised a cry that a rebel was escaping, and the two oarsmen had barely time to conceal themselves without being discovered. However, in flat defiance of everyone's advice, and, as it turned out, in spite of the drunken state of Cousselain, Johnstone resolved to repeat the attempt in an hour's time, taking in the end, as he might have done at the beginning, his place at the oar. For a few moments they breathed freely; then the wind got up, and the waves, and, what was perhaps more dangerous, the drunken Cousselain, who had been placed in the bottom of the boat. 'We were obliged to kick him most unmercifully in order to keep him quiet,' observes Johnstone, 'and to threaten to throw him overboard if he made the least movement. Seton and myself rowed like galley slaves. We succeeded in landing, about six in the morning, on a part of the coast a league and a half to the east of Edinburgh,[23] near the battlefield of Gladsmuir.' Here he parted with his deliverers, tenderly embracing young Seton, and presenting to the 'somewhat sober' Cousselain a gratification beyond his hopes.
After taking a little of the food with which Mr. Seton had provided him, he determined to seek refuge for a few days with an old governess, Mrs. Blythe, wife of a small shipowner at Leith. Blythe himself was another of the many 'rigid Calvinists and sworn enemies of the house of Stuart' to whom Johnstone entrusted his safety during his wanderings, and never once had occasion to repent it. Mr. Blythe, indeed, combined the profession of Calvinist with that of smuggler, and had numerous hiding places in his house for the concealment of contraband goods, which would prove equally serviceable, as Johnstone told him, for 'the most contraband and dangerous commodity that he had ever had in his possession.'