Chapter III: The Alarm

He soon reached Inversnaid, which lay about three miles distant.

At first he walked but slowly, comparatively speaking, as he believed the girl to be quite dead; but the motion of her limbs, as he proceeded, having caused the blood to circulate, he perceived with joy that she still lived, and then he increased his pace to a run, which soon brought him to the cottage of her father, Callam MacAleister (_i.e._, the son of the arrowmaker), to whose care he consigned her; and the bed of the little sufferer was rapidly surrounded by all the commiserating gossips and wise-women of the clachan.

No doctors were required by the hardy men of these secluded districts. Their wives and daughters knew well how to salve a sore; to bind up a slash from an axe or sword; to place lint on a bullet-hole, or on a stab from a dirk; while valerian, all-heal, liver-wort, and wild carrot, bruised in a quaichful of whisky, formed the entire _materia medica_ of the matron of a family. So men lived till patriarchal years, strong, active, and fearless as mountain-bulls; for sickness was unknown among them.

Of these female family physicians, Rob's wife, the Lady of Inversnaid, was the queen in her time and locality.

Inversnaid is a small hamlet on the estate of the same name which formed the patrimony of Rob Roy. It lies two miles eastward from Loch Lomond, on the bank of a small stream, which falls into the great sheet of water, from a lesser, named Loch Arklet, a place of gloomy aspect.

Northward, on the side of the latter, is a deep and wild cavern, which sheltered Robert Bruce after the battle of Dalree, in Strathfillan; and on more than one occasion, in time of peril, it became a place of concealment for our hero.

As MacGregor approached his own house--a large and square two-storied mansion, the walls of which were rough-cast with white lime, and which, though thatched with heather, had an air of comfort and consequence in that locality,--a wild cry, that pierced the still air of the evening, made him pause and turn round with his right hand on the hilt of his dirk.

Alarmed by the protracted absence of the boy, Fairhaired Colin, his widowed mother had sought the glen where the foray had been. The last red gleam of the sunset had faded upward from the summit of Ben Lomond, and the dark woods and deep glens about its base were buried in all the obscurity of night, till the moon arose, and then the mountain-stream, and the pools amid the moss and heather, glittered in its silver sheen.

The cattle had disappeared as well as their young watchers, and the heart of the widow became filled with vague alarm.

Now a mournful cry came at times upon the wind of the valley, and made her blood curdle. Was it the voice of a spirit of the air, or of a water-cow, that had come down the stream from the loch? Again and again it fell upon her ear, till at last she recognized it to be the howling of her son's companion and favourite, the little otter terrier; and she rushed forward to discover the dog, which was concealed by some tufts of broom.

The sweet perfume of the bog-myrtle was filling the atmosphere as the dew fell on its leaves; and now, deep down in the glen, where the soil had never been stirred, where the heather grew thick and soft, and where the yellow broom shed "its tassels on the lea," the poor woman found her son, her only child, lying dead, and covered with blood.

His right hand still grasped his skene dhu, and near him lay the chanter, to the notes of which Oina had sung, and a black, ravenous glede soared away from the spot as she approached.

At first, his white and ghastly face, his fixed and glazed eyes, struck terror on the mother's soul, and she shrunk back--shrunk from the babe she had borne, the child she had nursed; then she cast herself in wild despair beside the body--in such despair as had never filled her heart since the Grahames of Montrose had hanged her husband, Ian Bane, on the old yew-tree of Kincardine, for the crime of being a--MacGregor.

Then endued by frenzy with superhuman strength, she snatched up the dead boy, and bore him in her arms, sending shriek after shriek before her, as she rushed through the glen and across the moorland, towards the clachan of Inversnaid.

It was her cry that Rob Roy heard, as he paused at his own threshold, and turning away, he hastened to meet her, just as she sank at the door of her cottage.

The whole population of the clachan was speedily alarmed, and the wailing of the women mingled with the deep-muttered vengeance of the men, as they began to arm, and looked to Rob Roy for orders and instructions.