had been removed to a safe hiding-place, and scarcely a trace was
left to show that the law had ever been broken here, or that illicit
whisky had been distilled.

Before daylight came, however, the exciseman had awakened in torment--a
racking headache, deadly thirst, a mouth suggestive of a bird-cage, all,
in fact, that a man might expect who had partaken too freely of raw and
fiery whisky. He felt, indeed, extremely and overpoweringly unwell, as,
with an infinity of trouble, he groped his devious way to the open air,
and to the burn that went singing by. Here, after drinking copiously, he
lay till grey dawn, groaning, 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