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 nor Lord Ross to take the field.  Some feeling of compunction may have kept the latter from drawing his sword against an old comrade in arms; but Lord Annandale had always been fonder of wrangling than fighting.  Mackay makes no mention of any artillery; but it appears that he had a few small field-pieces of the kind known as Sandy’s Stoups from the name of their inventor.[96]

It is only possible to guess at Dundee’s numbers.  When he broke up his army early in June he seems to have had about three thousand claymores under him.  The second muster was, we know, much smaller than the first; and though it was slightly increased on the march, and while he waited at Blair, the whole force he led at Killiecrankie cannot have much exceeded two thousand men.  Over and above the claymores he had not four hundred.  The Irish were three hundred, and his cavalry mustered about fifty sabres.  Highland tradition puts the claymores at nineteen hundred; and this is probably much about the truth.  Artillery, of course, he had none.