No time was lost in making an appeal to King James, which resulted in an application to the English Government.  But while the English authorities quibbled, paltered, and delayed—­with a little evasion, a little extra red-tapism, a little judicious procrastination—­the days of Kinmont Willie were being numbered by his captors.  The triumph of putting an end to the daring deeds of so bold a Scottish reiver when they had him safely in chains in Carlisle Castle, was one that they were not likely lightly to forego.  It would be indeed a merry crowd of English Borderers that flocked to Haribee Hill on the day that Will of Kinmont dangled from the gallows.

Buccleuch saw that he had no time to lose.  He himself must strike at once, and strike with all his might.

The night of April 13, 1596, was dark and stormy.  All the Border burns and rivers were in spate; the winds blew shrewd and chill through the glens of Liddesdale, and sleet drifted down in the teeth of the gale.  The trees that grew so thick round Woodhouselee bent and cracked, and sent extra drenching showers of rain down on the steel jacks of a band of horsemen who carefully picked their way underneath them, on to the south.  Buccleuch was leader, and with him rode some forty picked men of his friends and kinsmen, to meet some hundred and fifty or so of other chosen men.  Scotts, Elliots, Armstrongs, and Grahams were there, and although Buccleuch had requested that only younger sons were to risk their lives in the forlorn hope that night, Auld Wat o’ Harden and many another landowner rode with their chief.  “Valiant men, they would not bide,” says Scott of Satchells, whose own father was one of the number.  Kinmont Willie’s own tower of Morton, on the water of Sark, about ten miles north of Carlisle, was their rallying point.  Buccleuch had arranged every detail most carefully at a horse-race held at Langholm a few days before, and one of the Grahams, an Englishman whose countrymen were not yet aware that the Graham clan had allied themselves to that of the Scotts, had conveyed his ring to Kinmont Willie to show him that he was not forgotten by his feudal lord.  One and all, the reivers were well armed, “with spur on heel, and splent on spauld,” and with them they carried scaling ladders, picks, axes, and iron crowbars.  The Esk and Eden were in furious flood, but no force of nature or of man could stay the reivers’ horses that night.

     “We go to catch a rank reiver
     Has broken faith wi’ the bauld Buccleuch.”

That was the burden of their thoughts, and although they well knew that ere the dawning each one of them might be claiming the hospitality of six feet of English sod, their hearts were light.  To them a message that the fray was up was like the sound of the huntsman’s horn in the ears of a thoroughbred hunter.

     “’Where are ye gaun, ye mason lads,
     Wi’ a’ your ladders, lang and hie?’
     ’We gang to berry a corbie’s nest,
     That wons not far frae Woodhouselee.’”