o decimate the guilty would have been to commit a frightful
massacre. His habitual piety too led him to consider the unexampled
panic which had seized his soldiers as a proof rather of the divine
displeasure than of their cowardice. He acknowledged with heroic
humility that the singular firmness which he had himself displayed in
the midst of the confusion and havoc was not his own, and that he
might well, but for the support of a higher power, have behaved as
pusillanimously as any of the wretched runaways who had thrown away
their weapons and implored quarter in vain from the barbarous marauders
of Athol. His dependence on heaven did not, however, prevent him from
applying himself vigorously to the work of providing, as far as human
prudence could provide, against the recurrence of such a calamity as
that which he had just experienced. The immediate cause of his defeat
was the difficulty of fixing bayonets. The firelock of the Highlander
was quite distinct from the weapon which he used in close fight. He
discharged his shot, threw away his gun, and fell on with his sword.
This was the work of a moment. It took the regular musketeer two or
three minutes to alter his missile weapon into a weapon with which he
could encounter an enemy hand to hand; and during these two or three
minutes the event of the battle of Killiecrankie had been decided.
Mackay therefore ordered all his bayonets to be so formed that they
might be screwed upon the barrel without stopping it up, and that his
men might be able to receive a charge the very instant after firing,
[373]

As soon as he learned that a detachment of the Gaelic army was advancing
towards Perth, he hastened to meet them at the head of a body of
dragoons who had not been in the battle, and whose spirit was therefore
unbroken. On Wednesday the thirty-first of July, only four days after
his defeat, he fell in with the Robertsons near Saint Johnston's,
attacked them, routed them, killed a hundred and twenty of them, and
took thirty prisoners, with the loss of only a single soldier, [374]
This skirmish produced an effect quite out of proportion to the number
of the combatants or of the slain. The reputation of the Celtic arms
went down almost as fast as it had risen. During two or three days it
had been every where imagined that those arms were invincible. There was
now a reaction. It was perceived that what had happened at Killiecrankie
was an exception to ordinary rules, and that