A comparison of the two accounts might suffice to establish their respective credibility. But another test is available. There is a third version of the death of John Brown. It is given by Patrick Walker, a pedlar and Covenanting martyrologist, who implies that he himself got it from Brown’s widow, ‘sitting upon her husband’s gravestone.’ Apart from minor discrepancies between his narrative and that of Wodrow, there are at least three important points with regard to which it directly confirms Claverhouse’s report. It not only asserts that the carrier, when brought to his house, was examined by his captor, but it also adds that though a man of a stammering speech, he yet answered distinctly and solidly. In contradiction of the statement that ‘with some difficulty he was allowed to pray,’ it represents Claverhouse as saying to him, ‘Go to your prayers, for you shall immediately die.’ Most important of all, however, it affirms distinctly and circumstantially that ‘Claverhouse ordered six soldiers to shoot him,’ and that ‘the most part of the bullets came upon his head, which scattered his brains upon the ground.’ Within a week after the shooting of John Brown, there occurred another execution, the responsibility for which has been laid on Claverhouse by several of the writers who chronicle the sufferings of the Covenanters at this time The first of them is Alexander Shields. ‘The said Claverhouse,’ he says, ‘together with the Earl of Dumbarton and Lieutenant-General Douglas, caused Peter Gillies, John Bryce, Thomas Young (who was taken by the Laird of Lee), William Fiddisone, and John Buiening to be put to death upon a gibbet, without legal trial or sentence, suffering them neither to have a Bible nor to pray before they died.’ De Foe, whilst deepening the atrocity of the deed, allows no one to share the guilt of it with Claverhouse. According to him, somebody had maliciously told Graham that five men who lay in ‘several prisons,’ to which they had been committed by ‘other persecutors,’ were ‘of the Whigs that used the field meetings; upon which, without any oath made of the fact, or any examination of the men, without any trial or other sentence than his own command, his bloody soldiers fetched them all to Mauchline, a village where his headquarters were, and hanged them immediately, not suffering them to enter into any house at their coming, nor at the entreaty of the poor men would permit one to lend them a Bible, who it seems offered it, nor allow them a moment to pray to God.’