before the very day of the murder. James and his son were arrested on
May 16, and taken to Fort William; scores of other persons were
arrested, and the Campbells, to avenge Glenure, made the most minute
examinations of hundreds of people. Meanwhile Allan, having got 5_l._
and his French clothes by the agency of his cousin the pedlar,
decamped from Coalisnacoan in the night, and marched across country to
the house of an uncle in Rannoch. Thence he escaped to France, where
he was seen in Paris by an informant of Sir Walter Scott's in the dawn
of the French Revolution; a tall, thin, quiet old man, wearing the
cross of St. Louis, and looking on at a revolutionary procession.

The activities of the Campbells are narrated in their numerous
unpublished letters. We learn from a nephew of Glenure's that he had
been 'several days ago forewarned,' by whom we cannot guess;
tradition tells, as I have said, that he feared danger only in
Lochiel's country, Lochaber, and thought himself safe in Appin. The
warning, then, probably came from a Cameron in Lochaber, not from a
Stewart in Appin. In coincidence with this is a dark anonymous
blackmailing letter to Fassifern, as if _he_ had urged the writer to
do the deed:

'You will remember what you proposed on the night that Culchena was
buried, betwixt the hill and Culchena. I cannot deny but that I had
breathing' (a whisper), 'and not only that, but proposal of the same
to myself to do. Therefore you must excuse me, when it comes to the
push, for telling the thing that happened betwixt you and me that
night.... If you do not take this to heart, you may let it go as you
will.' (June 6, 1752.)

Fassifern, who had no hand in the murder, 'let it go,' and probably