A native of the neighbourhood of Oban, on his way home from Loch Awe-side, after crossing the hills and coming in above Kilmore, was joined by three strangers. He spoke to them, but received no answer. At a small public-house on the roadside he asked them in for a refreshment. They then told him they had business to attend to, and that after entering the house he was not on any account to come out or attempt to go home that night. On parting, the strangers turned off the high road by a private road leading to a neighbouring gentleman’s house. The night proved unusually stormy, and the man did not move from the inn till morning. He then heard that the gentleman, towards whose house the three mysterious strangers had gone, had died the previous evening just about the time they would have arrived there. No person in the house or neighbourhood saw anything of them. It has been already mentioned that the devil, or his emissaries, in the shape of three ravens, waited to catch the soul of Michael Scott as soon as it left the body. A freebooter of former days, who made a house underground for his wife in Loch Con, in Lower Rannoch (_Bun Raineach_), that he and his men might swear he had no wife above ground, and then married another, was at his death carried away by twelve ravens. MAKING THE DEVIL YOUR SLAVE. Those who had the courage to perform the awful _taghairm_,[91] called up the devil to grant any worldly wish they might prefer; the disciples of the black art made him their obedient servant. Michael Scott, whose reputation as a magician is as great in the Highlands as in the Lowlands, made him his slave. He could call him up at any time.