During this pause, the hounds having hit on the scent again, the King was left behind, but spurred on. At every check, the Master kept urging him to make haste, so James did not tarry to break up the deer, as usual. The kill was but two bowshots from the stables, and the King did not wait for his sword, or his second horse, which had to gallop a mile before it reached him. Mar, Lennox, and others did wait for their second mounts, some rode back to Falkland for fresh horses, some dragged slowly along on tired steeds, and did not rejoin James till later. Ruthven had tried, James says, to induce him to refuse the company of the courtiers. Three or four servants, he said, would be enough. The others ‘might mar the whole purpose.’ James was ‘half angry,’ he began to entertain odd surmises about Ruthven. One was ‘it might be that the Earl his brother _had handled him so hardly_, that the young gentleman, being of a high spirit, had taken such displeasure, as he was become somewhat beside himself.’ But why should Gowrie handle his brother hardly? The answer is suggested by an unpublished contemporary manuscript, ‘The True Discovery of the late Treason,’ {48a} &c. ‘Some offence had passed betwixt the said Mr. Alexander Ruthven’ (the Master) ‘and his brother, for that the said Alexander, both of himself and by his Majesty’s mediation, had craved of the Earl his brother the demission and release of the Abbey of Scone, which his Majesty had bestowed upon the said Earl during his life. . . . His suit had little success.’ {48b} If this be fact (and there is no obvious reason for its invention), James might have reason to suspect that Gowrie had ‘handled his brother hardly:’ Scone being a valuable estate, well worth keeping. To secure the King’s favour as to Scone, Ruthven had a motive, as James would understand, for making him, and not Gowrie, acquainted with the secret of the treasure. Thus the unpublished manuscript casually explains the reason of the King’s suspicion that the Earl might have ‘handled the Master hardly.’ On some such surmise, James asked Lennox (who corroborates) whether he thought the Master quite ‘settled in his wits.’ Lennox knew nothing but good of him (as he said in his evidence), but Ruthven, observing their private talk, implored James to keep the secret, and come _alone_ with him—at first—to see the captive and the treasure. James felt more and more uneasy, but he had started, and rode on, while the Master now despatched Andrew Ruthven to warn Gowrie. Within a mile of Perth the Master spurred on his weary horse, and gave the news to Gowrie, who, despite the messages of Henderson and Andrew Ruthven, was at dinner, unprepared for the Royal arrival. However, Gowrie met James with sixty men (four, says the Ruthven apologist).