Clenching his right hand, he would have struck the duke to the earth, but for a piteous shriek which burst from his lady. At that moment the iron gate of the Comyns Tower was thrown furiously open, and an officer rushed forth, sword in hand, followed by sixty soldiers, who instantly surrounded MacGregor, and beat him down with the butt-ends of their muskets. "Had you surrendered in proper time, Mr. MacGregor _Campbell_," said the duke, with ungenerous irony, "we had not been compelled to resort to these rough measures in capturing you." Rob Roy laughed scornfully. "You would have asked me to surrender, my lord duke; but for a MacGregor to surrender is to die with ignominy; to resist to the end is to die with honour to ourselves and our forefathers. A hundred and twenty years of oppression have made us what we are now; but a time may come when even the cunning Lowlander shall weep for the snare of to-day, and shall tremble at the vengeance of Clan Alpine!" "Zounds! but you are a bold fellow to be a gentleman-drover--a seller of black cattle," said the duke, mockingly. "Do not condescend to sneer at an unfortunate man, my lord; it was honester to sell Scottish cattle than our good old Scottish kingdom. I have sold many a thousand head of stots and stirks to the English; but I would rather have died--yea, upon a common gibbet--than have sold the free land of my forefathers, as Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage--even as you and others sold yours on that black Beltane day, in 1707!" "Tie this fellow with cords, and away with him," said the duke, rendered furious by this taunt. He was then secured with ropes, and dragged from the castle to the adjacent village, where he was thrust into a cottage and kept under a strong escort till his captor made further arrangements. Bound and manacled like the fugitive bankrupt, the rebel and outlaw they had made him, and which they so ungenerously assumed him to be, MacGregor for a time felt all the bitterness and despair that could sting a spirit so generous, so proud and untameable, when reflecting on the perfidious stroke of fortune which thus placed him so completely at the mercy of his tormentors. He thought of the joy and triumph of Montrose and Killearn, of Carden, Luss, Aberuchail, and others, whom his sword had so long kept at bay; he thought of the grief of his homeless wife and children, whom that sword had been so often drawn to feed and to defend. He thought of the shameful and ignominious death which awaited him as surely as the breath of Heaven was in his nostrils; he thought of his landless, nameless, broken and degraded clan, left without a head to direct, or a leader to avenge them, and he well-nigh wept in his agony of soul! MacAleister, on beholding him dragged across the lawn, surrounded by a company of soldiers, uttered a shout of grief and rage, as he sprang from one of the windows of the castle.