By these devices Barisdale compelled his neighbours to pay, in blackmail, ‘above double their proportion of the land-tax in Seaforth’s, Lovat’s, and Chisholme’s country.’ He captained a kind of ‘Watch.’ But Barisdale’s ‘Watch’ was expensive and unsatisfactory to his subscribers. As early as 1742 we have found Cluny setting up an opposition in business. Cluny’s Watch is described at great length by the author of a kind of memoir of the chief, written in France in 1755-1760. The writer’s object is to show how much Cluny lost by his loyalty to the Stuarts, and how much he deserves the encouragement of Louis XV. He established, for the discouragement of theft, ‘a watch or safeguard of his own trusted followers.’ The nobility and gentry ‘were surpris’d at Cluny’s success, and enveyed so much his happiness, that they applyed to him with one accord, to take them under his protection, and cheerfully offered to join in a voluntary subscription....’ Among the subscribers are the Duke of Gordon, the Earl of Airlie, the Earl of Aberdeen, Forbes of Culloden, the Mackintosh, Grant of Grant, and even the Duke of Argyll. These facts attest the extent of Barisdale’s raids. Cluny was highly successful, rescuing ‘even those who had never applyed to him.’ The subscriptions amounted to 20,000 livres, and the Dukes of Atholl and Perth, with Seaforth, were about to join. It was now that a preacher, thundering against theft, was interrupted by a listener who ‘desired him to save his labour upon that point, for Mons. de Cluny alone would gain more souls to heaven in one year, than all the priests in the highlands could ever do in fifty.’ The English Ministry, hearing of Cluny’s fame, now sent him, unasked, a captain’s commission in Loudon’s regiment, worth 6,000 livres yearly. But he threw up his new commission when he joined Prince Charles. Cluny’s spirited behaviour, says MS. 104, ‘took the bread out of their mouths,’ the mouths of Barisdale & Co. But ‘Barisdale, by the former trade (theft) and the latter expedient (blackmail), lived at a very high rate, and mortgaged a large sum of money on Glengarry’s estate,’ where he was a wadsetter. Cluny’s opposition may have led to his duel with Barisdale, as reported by the Stuarts d’Albanie. Barisdale was, as we have seen, like Lochgarry, a wadsetter of Glengarry’s; that is, he received from Glengarry certain lands, redeemable after a specified interval of time, in exchange for money paid, or bills, or perhaps for cattle, which he was skilled in procuring. We do not find that the chief, Glengarry, could or did exercise any authority in controlling the excesses and depredations of his independent cousin Col. For this he is blamed by the author of the Gartmore MS., but his Mackenzie following made Col too strong for his chief.