the thundering of the linn incessantly jarring his splitting head.  Then, when there was light enough, the unhappy man rose on unsteady feet, and started looking for his horse.  A fruitless search; no sign of a horse could be seen, beyond the trampled space where he had stood the previous night, and a few hoof-prints in the soft, peaty soil elsewhere.  There was no help for it; he must tramp; and with throbbing temples he pursued a tottering and uncertain course homewards.  Next day he returned, full of schemes of revenge, and with help sufficient to overcome any resistance that Donald and his friends could possibly make, even if they thought it wise to attempt any resistance whatever, which was unlikely.

It was a crestfallen gauger that reached Donald’s bothy on this second visit.  He found his horse, it is true, pinched and miserable, and with staring coat, and without saddle or bridle.  But of Donald or of the Still, or the products of that Still, not a sign—­only a few taunting, ill-spelled words traced in chalk, with evident care and much painful toil, on the knocked-out head of an old cask.

In another part of this volume mention has already been made of Frank Stokoe, who, after being “out” in the ’15 with Lord Derwentwater, died in great poverty.  His family never again rose to anything like affluence, nor even to a status much above that of the ordinary labouring classes, but his descendants were always big, powerful men, perhaps slow of brain, but ready with their hands, and there was at least one of them who was afterwards well known in Northumberland.  This was Jack Stokoe, a noted and very daring smuggler.

Jack lived in a curious kind of a den of a house far up one of the wild glens that are to be found in that moorland country which lies between the North and the South Tyne.  It could scarcely be claimed that he was a farmer—­indeed, in those days there was nothing to farm away up among those desolate hills—­and therefore Stokoe made no attempt to pose as anything in the bucolic line; it was a pretty open secret that his real occupation was neither more nor less than smuggling.  But he had never yet been caught while engaged in running a contraband cargo, and, whatever reason there may have been for suspicion, no revenue officer had ever had courage to make a raid on his house.  There came, however, to that district a new officer, one plagued with an abnormally strong sense of duty, a “new broom,” in fact, an altogether too energetic enthusiast who could by no means let well alone, but must ever be poking into other people’s affairs in a way that began at length to create extreme annoyance in the minds of those honest gentlemen, the smugglers.