They prepared a different welcome now for the young Earl. The citizens were armed and drilled, guns mounted, trenches dug, and the town generally put into such a state of defence as was possible. Meanwhile Montrose was at his own place in Forfarshire, beating up for recruits. While there he heard that the few allies the Covenant could boast in that quarter were to meet at Turriff, a market-town on the borders of Banffshire, mostly gentry of the district, Frasers and Forbeses, who were jealous of the Gordons and ready to join any party against them. Huntly heard also of the meeting and resolved to disperse it. But Montrose was too quick for him. With one of those lightning dashes which were to be the secret of his successes against the Covenant, he now won the first point in the game for it. Taking with him barely two hundred of his own men, he hurried across the Grampians by the most unfrequented routes, and when Huntly at the head of two thousand men marched into Turriff he was greeted with a compact array of musket-barrels levelled at him across the wall of the little churchyard. His orders were explicit. He was not to proclaim his commission till the time came, and that mysterious moment was to be decided not by him but by Hamilton. Moreover he was to avoid all risk of bloodshed for the present. He knew Montrose would fight, and, though he was perhaps the better man for the moment, he knew also that Leslie was at hand with a force more than double his own. Had the positions of the two leaders been reversed there can be no doubt what Montrose would have done. But Huntly was not Montrose. He withdrew to Inverury, and disbanding the most part of his men left Aberdeen to its fate. This was not so severe as probably the citizens had expected, and as certainly some of the Covenanters wished. A few days after the affair at Turriff, Montrose joined hands with Leslie and entered Aberdeen in triumph at the head of six thousand men, each of whom wore a blue scarf, or carried a knot of blue ribbons in his cap, in opposition to the royal scarlet which Huntly had taken for his colours. To condescend to the devices of these godless cavaliers shocked some of Montrose's solemn captains, but the young general was right. He knew the value of a distinctive symbol to warm men's hearts, especially the hearts of soldiers, and that it was none the worse for pleasing their eyes as well. The blue ribbons were at once popular, and Montrose's _whimsies_, as they were at first contemptuously called, soon became the recognised badge of the Covenanters.