At the foot of the mountains, he occupied a small hut, walled with turf and thatched with heather, at a place called Uach-dair Tir--now _Auchtertyre_; but his chief haunt was that savage pass in the Sidlaws, known as the Glack of Newtyle, where he waylaid, robbed, and slew the solitary travellers who chanced to be benighted in that wild and lonely district, which then lay between Dundee and Strathmore. Several who had escaped him, and reached either the Castle of Bailie-Craig, which was close by, or that of the Constable of Dundee, related how they had been encountered by a man of frightful aspect and vast stature, armed with a great mace and poniard. All accounts of him were similar. He was entirely clad in homespun grey, with rough deer-skin shoes and galligaskins; a broad belt of cowhide encircled his waist, and his head, which was ever destitute of bonnet, was protected by a forest of matted black hair. A blow from his clenched hand was sufficient to brain a mountain bull, or smite a charger to the earth; and those who escaped from him, averred that they saw him sucking the blood from the wounds of those he had slain, and rending asunder their limbs like the branches of a withered bush, while he picked their bones, as a marmoset might pick those of a chicken. In that age of credulity and marvel, such stories made a terrible impression on the people. The whole of Angus rang with them--and others were constantly being added, each more startling than the last. The men of Strathmore, the light Lindesays, the vassals of Glammis, and even the valiant Sutors of Forfar, never ventured abroad alter night-fall, save in parties of three or four, and always well armed with their quarter staves or two-handed swords. Twice had men of undoubted valour and veracity averred that they had slain him; one an arrow-maker of Dundee, by a wound he had given him in the throat; another who was a sword-slipper of Banff, by a thrust he had given him in the breast; but they were taunted as bootless boasters, for this strange and uncouth being was still haunting the pass of the Sidlaws. A succession of these incredible stories excited the wonder and kindled the chivalry of Sir James Scrimegeour of Dudhope, the young constable of Dundee; and attended only by Lord Drummond--then Sir John of that ilk--well mounted and in full armour, on St. John's night in the year 1440, he rode to the Glack of Newtyle, and there, like a paladin of old, blew three blasts with his bugle-horn. The night was unusually dark, and the broad sheet lightning was reddening the sky behind the black peak of Kinpurnie, which is eleven-hundred feet in height, and is the highest of the Sidlaw range. The narrow-bridle path which led through the Glack was buried in obscurity, and clumps of stunted firs which grew in the morasses waved mournfully in the wind that sang down the mountain pass and through their wiry foliage.