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.

He was generous, too, as he was brave, for the boy once nearly perished in the deep drift of a corrie, when searching amid the winter snow for the lost sheep of a poor herdsman who was sick. Every way in spirit Ronald was his father's son!

On this day in spring, when his fish-basket was pretty well filled with spotted trout, and the long mountain-shadows cast by the setting sun began to remind him of the distance that lay between Loch Arclet and the secluded little farm of Portnellan, he was preparing to quit his sport, when three redcoats suddenly appeared on the narrow footway, so Ronald turned to fly.

That he strove to avoid them in those days need not excite wonder; for such were the atrocities of the British and Hessian troops in the Highlands, and so much was their uniform abhorred for generations after, that many a Highlander, who in manhood has led his company or regiment to the storming of Badajoz and the fields of Vittoria and Waterloo, when a boy was wont to fly to the woods for concealment, when by chance he saw a red-coat on the roads that led to the chain of forts in the Great Glen of Caledonia.

A pistol-shot fired by one of these strangers now made Ronald pause, as it struck a rock before him, and turning, with a flushed brow and an agitated heart, he found himself confronted by Major Huske and two soldiers, with whom he had been shooting, scouting, or rambling by the side of Loch Arclet.

Enraged to find himself thus molested, on the land which Ronald knew to be his father's heritage, he laid his hand on his dirk and boldly confronted the major, whose large, square, red-skirted coat, three-cornered hat, and Ramillies wig, were all fraught with terrors, which the boy sought to conceal, for he felt that it would ill become his father's son to quail beneath a Saxon eye.

"Will you sell your fish, my little man?" asked the major; but Ronald knew as little of English as the major did of Gaelic so a soldier had to act as interpreter for them.

"No," replied Ronald, sullenly.

"Then as we want some at the garrison, we shall be compelled to appropriate what you have," said Huske, peeping into the basket; "I warrant the money offered will not be allowed to lie on the heather."

"Take the fish if you want them, and let me be gone," replied Ronald, throwing his basket down.

"Whither go you?" asked Huske, suspiciously.

"To my home."

"Where is it?"

"Among the mountains--where you would not be wise to follow," replied the boy, boldly.

The soldier perhaps interpreted this with some awkwardness or severity, for Huske exclaimed furiously--

"'Sdeath! you young rascal; do you speak thus to me?"

"And why not, when I am a son of the Red MacGregor?" was the rash boy's response.

"Zounds! I thought as much," exclaimed Huske, with a malevolent gleam in his eyes; "Come, my lad, don't let us quarrel about a few fish. I have a particular desire to see your worthy father--he is a fine fellow, and a good judge of other men's cattle. We want some of the latter for the garrison. Can you tell me where he is?"

"Yes," said Ronald, with knitted brows and clenched teeth.

"Where, my boy?"

"Where you had better not seek him."

"Pshaw! will not this bribe you?" said Huske, slipping three guineas from his purse into Ronald's hand.

Though nurtured amid civil war and sore adversity, the poor boy knew well the value of the bribe so infamously offered by Huske, who had never forgotten nor forgiven his meetings with Rob Roy in Moffatdale and elsewhere. Ronald drew himself proudly up, and said--

"You ask me--you, a soldier--to betray my father?"

"Nay, nay; to discover----"

"To betray--Saxon captain, or Saxon dog, mince the words as you will!"

"A mutinous cur; but I'll tame him yet," muttered the major.

"You shall never get my father, alive at least; for he is strong and brave as Cuchullin!"

"Some other Highland savage, I suppose; but, egad, we shall see."

"Sir," said the soldier who acted as interpreter, "would it not be a good plan to let the young cub loose, and watch him well? in the end he would be sure to lead us to the old wolf's den."

"He would scramble up rocks where none but a cat or a monkey could follow, or leave us all floundering to the neck in some treacherous bog. No, no, I know better than that. Offer him three guineas more."

The soldier did so.

"You might as well ask me to blow the fire with my mouth full of meal," was Ronald's contemptuous reply; "for I would rather die than betray any man--to a base Saxon churl least of all!"

The soldier clenched his hand, but paused.

"Threaten if you will; but strike not!" said Ronald, with his right hand on his dirk.

"You little villain, would you dare to draw on us?" thundered Major Huske.

"Yes, even if you stood at the head of all your men, and dared to lay a hand on me," replied Ronald, bursting into tears of passion and fury, as he flung the guineas full into Huske's face.

Filled with rage by this insult, the latter rushed upon the brave boy and wrenched his dirk away. Ronald made a desperate resistance, he struggled kicked, bit, and fought; but he was soon dragged into the fort by the soldiers, who cast him, handcuffed, into a dark stone cell.

Huske, a brutal officer of the old Dutch or Revolution school, proposed to tie a cord round the poor boy's head, and twist it with a pistol-barrel or drumstick, until agony compelled him to furnish all the details required about his father's movements; but the officer next in command, Captain Henry Clifford, of the South British Fusiliers,* a humane English gentleman, opposed the cruel idea so vigorously that Huske abandoned it; so Ronald was closely watched, and fed on bread and water.

* New.

He was threatened with being flogged at the halberts, or with being hung on a tree; but nothing would make him tell aught to his father's enemies. Yet, though he kept a brave front to "the Saxons," as he named them, in the fulness of his heart and the solitude of his cell, he wept for his parents, and repeatedly offered up the prayers his mother taught him, and repeated to himself the twenty-second Psalm, "Shi Dhia fhein 'm buachalich" (the Lord is my shepherd).

Oina speedily informed the family at Portnellan of all this. She had now grown to womanhood, and was the wife of Alaster Roy. As a dealer in eggs, butter, and milk, she frequented the fort, and there learned the story of the young angler's capture.

This unwarrantable action filled MacGregor with just indignation, and Helen with lively fears, lest her golden-haired Ronald might be impressed for a sailor or soldier, or perhaps sold to the Dutch planters for a slave; and Rob swore upon the bare blade of his sword to raze Inversnaid to the ground, and to give Huske's flesh to the eagles of Ben Lomond ere the sun of the next Beltane day had risen, while his mother--an aged woman now--vowed that she too would march to the rescue, though armed only with her spindle and scissors.