Thus Scotland became a land of dread; the most restless man within her borders hardly dare travel beyond his byre.  The law was powerless against this indomitable scourge, and the reward of a thousand marks would have been offered in vain, had not Gilderoy’s cruelty estranged his mistress.  This traitress—­Peg Cunningham was her name—­less for avarice than in revenge for many insults and infidelities, at last betrayed her master.  Having decoyed him to her house, she admitted fifty armed men, and thus imagined a full atonement for her unnumbered wrongs.  But Gilderoy was triumphant to the last.  Instantly suspecting the treachery of his mistress, he burst into her bed-chamber, and, that she might not enjoy the price of blood, ripped her up with a hanger.  Then he turned defiant upon the army arrayed against him, and killed eight men before the others captured him.

Disarmed after a desperate struggle, he was loaded with chains and carried to Edinburgh, where he was starved for three days, and then hanged without the formality of a trial on a gibbet, thirty feet high, set up in the Grassmarket.  Even then Scotland’s vengeance was unsatisfied.  The body, cut down from its first gibbet, was hung in chains forty feet above Leith Walk, where it creaked and gibbered as a warning to evildoers for half a century, until at last the inhabitants of that respectable quarter petitioned that Gilderoy’s bones should cease to rattle, and that they should enjoy the peace impossible for his jingling skeleton.

Gilderoy was no drawing-room scoundrel, no villain of schoolgirl romance.  He felt remorse as little as he felt fear, and there was no crime from whose commission he shrank.  Before his death he confessed to thirty-seven murders, and bragged that he had long since lost count of his robberies and rapes.  Something must be abated for boastfulness.  But after all deduction there remains a tale of crime that is unsurpassed.  His most admirably artistic quality is his complete consistence.  He was a ruffian finished and rotund; he made no concession, he betrayed no weakness.  Though he never preached a sermon against the human race, he practised a brutality which might have proceeded from a gospel of hate.  He spared neither friends nor relatives, and he murdered his own mother with as light a heart as he sent a strange widow of Aberdeen to her death.  His skill is undoubted, and he proved by the discipline of his band that he was not without some talent of generalship.  But he owed much of his success to his physical strength, and to the temperament, which never knew the scandal of hesitancy or dread.