For about three weeks Charles shared the life of these outlaws, sleeping in caves and holes of the earth, living on the wild deer of their shooting and the secret gifts of the peasantry. They did not understand his English, but the Prince was beginning to pick up a little Gaelic. He was able at least to improve their cooking and reprove their swearing, two services they liked afterwards to recall. Here too, as elsewhere on his wanderings, the Prince gained the hearts of all his followers by his gracious gaiety and plucky endurance of hardships. In the beginning of August his hopes had again turned to Poole Ewe, but learning for a second time that no French ship could land on the closely guarded coast, he and his friends determined to remain in the northern straths of Inverness-shire till the Government troops should withdraw from the Great Glen--the chain of lakes which now forms the Caledonian Canal--and thus leave the way clear into Badenoch, where Lochiel and Macpherson of Cluny were hiding. A curious incident is supposed to have helped the Prince at this time. There had been among his Life Guards a handsome youth named Roderick Mackenzie, son of a jeweller in Edinburgh, who in face and figure was startlingly like the Prince. This lad was actually 'skulking' among the Braes of Glenmoriston at the time when the Prince was surrounded in Knoydart. A party of soldiers tracked him to a hut, which they surrounded. Flight was impossible, and the poor boy stood at bay. As he fell beneath their sword-thrusts he cried out, 'Villains, ye have slain your King.' Whether these words were a curious last flash of vanity, or whether he intended to serve the Prince by a generous act of imposture, can never be known. The soldiers at any rate believed that they had secured the prize. They carried off Mackenzie's head with them to Fort Augustus, and the authorities seem for some time to have been under the impression that it was indeed that of the Prince. Possibly it was owing to this that in the middle of August the Government rather relaxed their vigilance along the Great Glen. Charles was eager to press at once into Badenoch, but the wary outlaws would only consent to taking him to the Lochiel country, between Loch Arkaig, Loch Lochy, and Loch Garry. They travelled chiefly by night; the season was very wet, and the rivers were in flood, and they had to cross the River Garry Highland fashion in a line, with each man's arm on his neighbour's shoulder, for the water was running breast-high.