enant.
Allan McNab had come west with six hundred men to suppress the
rebellion. Realizing the hopelessness of further resistance, Duncombe
had tried to save his men by ordering them to disperse to their homes.
He himself, with his white horse, took to the woods, where he lay in
hiding all day--and it was a Canadian December--and foraged at night
for berries and roots. Judge Ermatinger gives the graphic story of
{425} Duncombe's escape. Starvation drove him to the house of a
friend. The friend was out, and when the wife asked who he was,
Duncombe laid his revolver on the table and made answer, "I am
Duncombe; and I must have food." Here he lay disguised so completely
with nightcap, nightdress, and all, as the visiting grandmother of the
family, that loyalists who saw his white horse and came in to search
the house, looked squarely at the recumbent figure beneath the
bedclothes and did not recognize him. Duncombe at last reached his
sister's home near London.

"Don't you know me?" he asked, standing in the open door, waiting for
her recognition. In the few weeks of exposure and pursuit his hair had
turned snow-white.

His friends suggested that he cross to the American frontier dressed as
a woman, and the disguise was so perfect, curls of his sister's hair
bobbing from beneath his bonnet, that two loyalist soldiers gallantly
escorted the lady's sleigh across unsafe places in the ice. Duncombe
waited till he was well on the American side, and his escorts on the
way back to Sarnia. Then he emitted a yell over the back of the
cutter, "Go tell your officers you have just helped Dr. Duncombe
across!"

Having lost the fight for a cause which events have since justified, it
is not surprising that the patriots on the American frontier now lost
their heads. They formed organizations from Detroit to Vermont for the
invasion of Canada and the establishment of a republic. These bands
were known as "Hunter's Lodges." Rolph and Duncombe repudiated
connection with them, but MacKenzie was head and heart for armed
invasion from Buffalo. Space forbids the story of these raids. They
would fill a book with such thrilling tales as make up the border wars
of Scotland.

The tumultuous year of 1837 closed with the burning of the _Caroline_.
MacKenzie had taken up quarters on Navy Island in Niagara River. The
_Caroline_, an American ship, was being employed to convey guns and
provisions to the insurgents' camp. On the Canad