peatedly given his own word, had shrunk to this--three hundred empty
mouths to feed, and three hundred useless hands to arm.[94]

And now word came that Mackay was approaching. He had marched by way of
Stirling to Perth, at which place he had appointed his muster. At
Stirling he had found six troops of dragoons, which he had ordered to
follow him to Perth. On July 26th he was at Dunkeld, where he received
word from Murray of Dundee's arrival at Blair, but not the dragoons he
was expecting from Stirling. His own cavalry consisted of but two
troops, chiefly composed of new levies. He dared no longer trust
Livingstone's dragoons in the face of the enemy. Half of the officers he
had been obliged to send under guard to Edinburgh as traitors: the rest
of the regiment was out of harm's way in quarters at Inverness. The
horses of Colchester's men were in such a plight after their marches
among the Grampians that they could not carry a saddle. Mackay knew well
how important cavalry was to the work before him. A mounted soldier was
the one antagonist a Highlander feared; and his fear was much the same
superstitious awe that a century and a half earlier the hordes of
Montezuma had felt for the armoured horsemen of Cortez. But the messages
from Murray were urgent, and he dared not delay. At break of day on
Saturday, the 27th, he marched out from Dunkeld for the glen of
Killiecrankie.

His force, according to his own calculation, was between three and four
thousand strong; but barely one half of these were seasoned troops.
There was the Scots Brigade, indeed, of three regiments, his own,
Balfour's, and Ramsay's. But before despatching them to Scotland William
had ordered them to be carefully weeded of all Dutch soldiers, that the
patriotism of the natives might be offended by no hint of a foreign
invasion; and the gaps thus made had been hastily filled up in
Edinburgh. Besides this brigade were three other regiments of infantry:
the one lately raised by Lord Leven (now the Twenty-fifth of the Line,
and still recognizing its origin in its title of The Borderers),
Hastings' (now the Thirteenth of the Line), and Lord Kenmure's.[95] Of
these, Hastings' was manned chiefly by Englishmen, and seems to have
been the only one of the three that had had any real experience of war.
One troop of horse was commanded by Lord Belhaven: the other should have
been commanded by Lord Annandale, whose name it bore, but Mackay could
persuade neither him