At an early hour in the morning, seven gentlemen and two servants, all well armed, might have been seen leaving Inverness by the bridge over the Ness, and proceeding along the shore of the Moray Firth. Taking post in the wood of Bunchrew, they waited till they saw two gentlemen with servants coming in the opposite direction, when they rushed out into the road with an evidently hostile intent. The leader, seizing one of the gentlemen with his own hand, called out to his followers to take the other dead or alive, and immediately, by levelling their pistols at him, they induced him to give himself up to their mercy. The victorious party then caused the two gentlemen to dismount and give up their arms, mounted them on a couple of rough ponies, and rode off with them into the wild country. This was entirely a piece of private war, in the style so much in vogue in the reign of the sixth James, but which had since declined, and was now approaching its final extinction. The leader of the assailants was Captain Simon Fraser, otherwise called the Master of Lovat, the same personage who, as Lord Lovat, fifty years after, came to a public death on Tower-hill. [Sidenote: 1697.] The father of this gentleman had recently succeeded a grandnephew as Lord Lovat; but his title to the peerage and estates, although really good, had been opposed under selfish and reckless views by the Earl of Tullibardine, son of the Marquis of Athole, and brother of the widow of the late Lovat; and as this earl chanced to be a secretary of state and the king’s commissioner to parliament, his opposition was formidable. Tullibardine’s wish was to establish a daughter of the late lord, a child of eleven years old, as the heiress, and marry her to one of his own sons. His sons, however, were boys; so he had to bethink him of a more suitable bridegroom in the person of Lord Salton, another branch of the house of Fraser. Meanwhile, Captain Simon, wily as a cat, and as relentless, sought to keep up his juster interest by similar means. He first tried to get the young lady into his power by help of a follower named Fraser of Tenechiel; but Tenechiel took a fit of repentance or terror in the midst of his enterprise, and replaced the child in her mother’s keeping. Lord Salton was then hurried northward to the Dowager Lady Lovat’s house of Castle Downie, to woo his child-bride, and arrange for her being brought to safer lodgings in Athole. He went attended by Lord Mungo Murray, brother at once to the Earl of Tullibardine and the Dowager Lady Lovat. The Master, seeing no time was to be lost, brought a number of the chief gentlemen of his clan together at a house belonging to Fraser of Strichen, and had no difficulty in taking them bound under oaths to raise their followers for the advancement of his cause. It was by their aid that he had seized on Lord Salton and Lord Mungo Murray at the wood of Bunchrew.