But perhaps the animosity here shown to Leehall comes more from one who was a lover of horses—­as who in Northumberland is not?—­than from a partisan of Lowes.  However, the feud ran on, year in, year out, as is the custom of such things, and no doubt it might have been bequeathed from father to son, like a property under entail, had it not been for the intervention of Frank Stokoe.  Lowes and Leehall, it seems, had met by chance near Sewing Shields, with the usual result.  Only, upon this occasion, the former was possibly not on the back of an animal the superior in speed and stamina of the horse on which Leehall was mounted.  At least, Lowes was captured.

But, having got him, his enemy did not proceed to cut him into gobbets, or even to “wipe the floor” with him.  Something lingering and long was more to his taste; he would make Lowes “eat dirt.”  With every mark, therefore, of ignominy and contempt, he dragged his fallen foe home to Leehall, and there chained him near to the kitchen fire-place, leaving just such length of chain loose as would enable the prisoner to sit with the servants at meals.  The position can scarcely have been altogether a pleasing one to the servants, to say nothing of the prisoner.  Doubtless the former, or some of them, may have found a certain joy in baiting, and in further humiliating, a helpless man, their master’s beaten enemy.  Yet that pleasure, one would think, could scarcely atone for the constant presence among them of an uninvited guest—­a guest, too, who had not much choice in the matter of personal cleanliness.  However, trifles of that nature did not greatly embarrass folk in days innocent of sanitary science.  As for Lowes, it must have been difficult so to act consistent with the maintenance of any shred of dignity, or of conciliatory cheerfulness.  If, for example, the cook should happen of a morning to have got out of bed “wrong foot first,” how often must the attentions of that domestic have taken the form of a pot or a pan, or other domestic utensil, flung at his head.  Here, no soft answer would be likely to turn away wrath.  On the spur of the moment, when a pot, or an iron spit, has caught one on elbow or shins, it might not be altogether easy to think promptly of the repartee likely to be the most conciliating.  And he could not “make himself scarce.”  The situation was embarrassing.

Now, the law, in those breezy times, took small cognisance of such little freaks as this; the law, indeed, was pretty powerless up among those wild hills.  It wanted some force stronger, or, at all events, some force less magnificently deliberate, than that of the law.

Frank Stokoe was that force.  To him went the friends of Lowes; and next morning saw the peel tower of Leehall besieged.  Frank demanded the surrender of Lowes, uninjured.  Leehall retorted that he might take him—­if he could.  But Leehall had reckoned without his retainers; they dared not fight against Frank Stokoe.  So they said.  But was it not, in reality, a sort of incipient Strike?  Did they, perhaps, being wearied of the somewhat tame sport of baiting him, think the opportunity a fitting one to get rid of their uninvited guest for good and all?  In any case, before an hour had passed, Leehall found it convenient to hand Lowes over to Stokoe, who safely deposited him by his own fireside at Willimoteswick, and the feud was pursued no further.