There were many heads shaken in Crossmichael at that judgment; the more so as the man had a villainous reputation among high and low, and both with the godly and the worldly.

At that very hour of his demise, he had ten going pleas before the Session, eight of them oppressive.

And the same doom extended even to his agents; his grieve, that had been his right hand in many a left-hand business, being cast from his horse one night and drowned in a peat-hag on the Kye-skairs; and his very doer (although lawyers have long spoons) surviving him not long, and dying on a sudden in a bloody flux.
In all these generations, while a male Rutherford was in the saddle with his lads, or brawling in a change-house, there would be always a white-faced wife immured at home in the old peel or the later mansion-house.

It seemed this succession of martyrs bided long, but took their vengeance in the end, and that was in the person of the last descendant, Jean.

She bore the name of the Rutherfords, but she was the daughter of their trembling wives.