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It was not until he was twenty years old that Ginger Stott played in his first Colts' match. The three years that had intervened had not been prosperous years for Hampdenshire. Their team was a one-man team. The best of the minor counties in those years were Staffordshire and Norfolk. In the Colts' match Stott's analysis ran: overs maidens runs wickets 11·3 7 16 7
I saw the Wonder before he was buried. I went up into the little bedroom and looked at him in his tiny coffin. I was no longer afraid of him. His power over me was dissipated. He was no greater and no less than any other dead thing. It was the same with every one. He had become that "poor little boy of Mrs. Stott's." No one spoke of him with respect now.
The regular court hours, however, soon palled on a man of Judge Stott's nervous temperament and it was not long before he retired to take up once more his criminal practice. He was still a young man, not yet fifty, and full of vigor and fight. He had a blunt manner but his heart was in the right place, and he had a record as clean as his close shaven face.
Among the papers, I came upon the famous caricature of Stott in the current number of Punch the "Stand-and-Deliver" caricature, in which Stott is represented with an arm about ten feet long, and the batsman is looking wildly over his shoulder to square leg, bewildered, with no conception from what direction the ball is coming. Underneath is written "Stott's New Theory the Ricochet. Real Ginger."
They, too, were beating among the gorse and brown bracken. They told me that Mr. Challis was at the cottage and I hurried on. All the neighbourhood, it seems, was searching for the Wonder. In the village I saw three or four women standing with aprons over their heads, talking together. I had never seen Pym so animated. I met Challis in the lane. He was coming away from Mrs. Stott's cottage.
Her story is as she just stood afore him with her mouth open like a Jack-o'-lantern's, wonderin' what under the sun she was goin' to be asked to remember next, an' when he said that was all, an' for her just to simply tear up the paper, she forgot all about Luther Stott's wife on the back an' tore up the paper.
I am looking after the hundredth the one that went astray. 'Better leave her alone, Mr. Penrose. There's an owd sayin' i' these parts that yo' cornd go into th' mill baat gettin' dusted. That means in yur talk that yo' cornd touch pitch baat gettin' blacked. If thaa goes to Mrs. Stott's they'll say thaart goan for naught good.
They had not Stott's physical advantages. Nevertheless, the shortness of that alley threw Stott back for two years. When he first emerged to try conclusions on the field, he found his length on the longer pitch utterly unreliable, and the effort necessary to throw the ball another six yards, at first upset his slowly acquired methods.
It all came back to me, little by little. I remembered that talk I had had with him, his very gestures; I remembered how he had spoken of habits, or the necessity for the lack of them, and that took me back to the scene in the British Museum Reading Room, and to my theory. I was suddenly alive to that old interest again. I got up and walked eagerly in the direction of Mrs. Stott's cottage.
With it all Challis was an idealist, and unpractical. His genial charity, his refinement of mind, his unthinking generosity, indicate the bias of a character which inclined always towards a picturesque optimism. It is not difficult to understand that he dared not allow himself to be convinced by Victor Stott's appalling synthesis.
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