Lord Salton and his friend were conducted amidst savage shouts and drawn dirks to the house of Fanellan, and there confined in separate apartments. The fiery cross was sent off, and the coronach cried round the country, to bring the faithful Frasers to the help of their young chief. A gallows was raised before the windows of the imprisoned gentlemen, as a hint of the decisive measures that might be taken with them. They saw hundreds of the clansmen arrive at muster on the green, with flags flying and bagpipes screaming, and heard their chief taking from them oaths of fidelity on their bare daggers. When five hundred were assembled—a week having now elapsed since the first assault—the Master put himself at their head, and went with his prisoners to Castle Downie, which he took into his care along with its mistress. The child, however, was safe from him, for [Sidenote: 1697.] she had been already transferred to a refuge in her uncle’s country of Athole. Fraser was, of course, mortified by her escape; but he was a man fertile in expedients. He first dismissed his two prisoners, though not till Salton had bound himself under a forfeiture of eight thousand pounds to ‘interfere’ no more in his affairs. His plan was now to secure, at least, the dowager’s portion of the late lord’s means by marrying her. So, too, he calculated, would he embarrass the powerful Tullibardine in any further proceedings against himself. That night, the lady’s three female attendants were removed from her by armed men; and one of them, on being brought back afterwards to take off her ladyship’s clothes, found her sitting in the utmost disorder and distress on the floor, surrounded by Fraser and his friends, himself trying by burned feathers to prevent her senses from leaving her, and the others endeavouring to divest her of her stays. Robert Monro, minister of Abertarf, then pronounced the words of the marriage-ceremony over her and the Master of Lovat. As the woman hurried out, she heard the screams of her mistress above the noise of the bagpipes played in the apartment adjacent to her bedroom; and when she came back next morning, she found the lady to appearance out of her judgment, and deprived of the power of speech. Lady Lovat was at this time a woman of about thirty-five years of age.