"My spirit may break, Colonel Grahame, but never shall it bend," replied Rob Roy; "I may have my faults like other men, but if the best of us had these written on his forehead, he would, as the saw hath it, pull his bonnet well over his eyes. Till your chief made himself my enemy, I was a quiet, a peaceful, and a God-fearing man; but he made desolate my hearth and home; he seized my patrimony, and cast me forth into the world a broken man, an outlaw, and a beggar, with a price upon my head, to be hunted like a wild beast by soldiers and militia, horse and foot--I, a Highland gentleman, whose lineage was equal, if not superior to his own. But as Fingal said to Swaran, 'The desert is enough for me, with all its deer and echoing woods!' so I took my target and claymore, and retired to the steep mountain and the wild forest, with my good wife and my little ones. Since then, all we have endured has been enough to summon all the spirits of the Clan Alpine who have suffered and died since the field of Glenfruin, back from blessed heaven to the vengeance of earth!" "Let their spirits come," said the duke, with fierce irony; "see if they will avail much, when you swing by the neck in the Broad Wynd of Stirling, even as Alaster of Glenstrae swung after his fine day's work at Glenfruin." "We are not yet in the Broad Wynd of Stirling," said Rob, confidently; "but set me free for five minutes--put my broadsword in my hand, and here, on this plot of grass, will I fight you face to face and foot to foot--ay, with three of your best men, if you choose." "I do not fight with felons," replied Montrose, loftily. "Will you not meet me like a brave,--I cannot call you an honest, man?" "I do not fight with felons," was again the cutting reply. MacGregor crimsoned with passion, and exclaimed hoarsely,--"Woe to you, dastard duke! Alas, that I should ever speak thus to one who bears the good name that was borne by the Great Marquis, the gallant Dundee!" "Enough of this," said the duke, also becoming red and husky with passion. "To horse, gentlemen, and away for Stirling. Colonel Grahame, bind the villain to one in whom you can place implicit trust, and let him be well watched. The man who permits him to escape, I will pistol with my own hand!" MacGregor was secured to a horse behind a trooper, whose waistbelt was passed through the belt from which his sword and pistols were taken; his hands were also tied behind, so that it was impossible for him either to slip or leap off; and in this ignominious fashion, escorted by nearly four hundred of the duke's local militia, horse and foot, he was carried away a prisoner. As they departed from the Haunted Well, he gazed sadly at the stiffened corpse of his faithful friend and foster-brother, Callam, son of the arrow-maker,--one who had never failed him in many an hour of peril, and whose remains were left where he fell, and where a cairn now marks his grave.