When she had been carried about the Macgregor country for some weeks, to evade the hue-and-cry that now could be pushed into the Highlands in place of the Fiery Cross, the Glengyle chieftain interfered in her favour. The brothers consented to let her go back to her friends, and under James Mhor’s care she was taken to Edinburgh, at first kept shut up there as a prisoner. But again the Court of Session stretched out its arm to place her in safety in the house of a [Illustration: THE CRAGS OF BEN VENUE] connection, guarded by sentinels against the Macgregors’ interference. The unfortunate woman appears to have been so broken down that her own mother hardly knew her; and her mind was shaken so that she could with difficulty be brought to relate the tale of her wrongs. The future Lord Kames, who had a professional interview with her, at first judged his client disposed to condone the violent marriage; then withdrew from the case because she gave it a different aspect at another time. Other accounts represent her as oppressed by an oath she had been forced to take when in the hands of the Macgregors. She did, however, make an affidavit as to what had happened, which formed a main piece of evidence after her death. Within the year she died at Glasgow, from smallpox, by popular account; what she had gone through might well have made her an easy victim to any illness. She had refused to see her husband again; and when, on the way to Glasgow, one of her escort remarked that a lonely stretch on the road was just the place for the wild Macgregors to appear, “God forbid!” she exclaimed, “the very sight of them would kill me.” Her experience had clearly not been that of the bride as to whose case an old lady warmly assured Scott: “My mither never saw my father till the night that he carried her awa’ wi’ ten head o’ black cattle, and there wasna a happier couple in a’ the Highlands.” For a year or two the brothers eluded justice. James was the first to be caught and brought to trial on a charge of abduction and of what in Scotland is the capital crime of _hame-sucken_, using violence to a person in his own house. The evidence was contradictory, and the verdict turned out rather vague, the jury recognising the abduction but inclining to look on the subsequent proceedings as condoned by consent. While the Court still sat discussing the effect of this verdict, James Mhor made a bold escape from Edinburgh Castle, to which he had been transferred from the Tolbooth for greater security. Here his daughter visited him, smuggling in a disguise turned to account as told in the _Scots’ Magazine_ of November 1752:--