Steer owned the local weed-sprayer, which, by village custom, was at the service of his neighbours in rotation. This year he fetched the sprayer back from Pethick’s farm just as it was on the point of going on to Bowden’s without reason given. Bowden, who would not have been above using ‘that chap’s’ sprayer so long as it came to him from Pethick in ordinary rotation, was above sending to Steer’s for it. He took the action as a public proclamation of enmity, and in ‘The Three Stars Inn,’ where he went nearly every evening for a glass of cider with a drop of gin and a clove in it, he said out loud that Steer was a ‘colley,’ and Ned wouldn’t be seen dead with that niece of his.
By those words, soon repeated far and wide, he committed his son just when Ned was cooling rapidly towards the girl Pansy, and beginning to think of going to church once more and seeing whether Molly wouldn’t look at him again. After all, it was he, not his father, who would have to go into the witness-box; moreover, he had nothing against Molly Winch.
Now that the feud was openly recognised by village tongues, its origin was already lost. No one--hardly even the Bowdens--remembered that Bowden’s dog had bitten Steer, and that Steer had shot it; so much spicier on the palate was Ned’s aberration with the girl Pansy, and its questionable consequences. Corn harvest passed, and bracken harvest; the autumn gales, sweeping in from the Atlantic, spent their rain on the moor; the birch-trees goldened and the beech-trees grew fox-red; and, save that Molly Winch was never seen, that Bowden and Steer passed each other as if they were stocks or stones, and for the interest taken in the girl Pansy’s appearance by anyone who had a glimpse of her (not often now, for she was seldom out of the farmyard) the affair might have been considered at an end.
The breach of promise suit was never mentioned--Steer was too secretive and too deadly in earnest; the Bowdens too defiant of the law, and too anxious to forget it; by never mentioning it, even to each other, and by such occasional remarks as: “Reckon that chap’s bit off more than he can chu,” they consigned it to a future which to certain temperaments never exists until it is the present. They had, indeed, one or two legal reminders, and Ned had twice to see Mr. Applewhite on market days, but between all this and real apprehension was always the slow and stolid confidence that the ‘Law’ could be avoided if you ‘sat tight and did nothin’.’