The Wonder Read Free

Stott’s life familiar to me, which have never been made public property. If I must repeat that which is known, I can give the known a new setting; perhaps a new value.
    He came of mixed races. His mother was pure Welsh, his father a Yorkshire collier; but when Ginger was nine years old his father died, and Mrs. Stott came to live in Ailesworth where she had immigrant relations, and it was there that she set up the little paper-shop, the business by which she maintained herself and her boy. That shop is still in existence, and the name has not been altered. You may find it in the little street that runs off the market place, going down towards the Borstal Institution.
    There are many people alive in Ailesworth to-day who can remember the sturdy, freckled, sandy-haired boy who used to go round with the morning and evening papers; the boy who was to change the fortunes of a county.
    Ginger was phenomenally thorough in all he undertook. It was one of the secrets of his success. It was this thoroughness that kept him engaged in his mother’s little business until he was seventeen. Up to that age he never found time for cricket—sufficient evidence of his remarkable and most unusual qualities.
    It was sheer chance, apparently, that determined his choice of a career.
    He had walked into Stoke-Underhill to deliver a parcel, and on his way back his attention was arrested by the sight of a line of vehicles drawn up to the boarded fencing that encloses the Ailesworth County Ground. The occupants of these vehicles were standing up, struggling to catch a sight of the match that was being played behind the screen erected to shut out non-paying sightseers. Among the horses’ feet, squirming between the spokes of wheels, utterly regardless of all injury, small boys glued their eyes to knot-holes in the fence, while others climbed surreptitiously, and for the most part unobserved, on to the backs of tradesmen’s carts. All these individuals were in a state of tremendous excitement, and even the policeman whose duty it was to move them on, was so engrossed in watching the game that he had disappeared inside the turnstile, and had given the outside spectators full opportunity for eleemosynary enjoyment.
    That tarred fence has since been raised some six feet, and now encloses a wider sweep of ground—alterations that may be classed among the minor revolutions effected by the genius of the thick-set, fair-haired youth of seventeen, who paused on that early September afternoon to wonder what all the fuss was about. The Ailesworth County Ground was not famous in those days; not then was accommodation needed for thirty thousand spectators, drawn from every county in England to witness the unparallelled.
    Ginger stopped. The interest of the spectacle pierced his absorption in the business he had in hand. Such a thing was almost unprecedented.
    “What’s up?” he asked of Puggy Phillips.
    Puggy Phillips—hazarding his life by standing on the shiny, slightly curved top of his butcher’s cart—made no appropriate answer. “Yah— ah —ah!” he screamed in ecstasy. “Oh! played! Pla-a-a-ayed!!”
    Ginger wasted no more breath, but laid hold of the little brass rail that encircled Puggy’s platform, and with a sudden hoist that lifted the shafts and startled the pony, raised himself to the level of a spectator.
    “’Ere!” shouted the swaying, tottering Puggy. “What the … are yer rup to?”
    The well-drilled pony, however, settled down again quietly to maintain his end of the see-saw, and, finding himself still able to preserve his equilibrium, Puggy instantly forgot the presence of the intruder.
    “What’s up?” asked Ginger again.
    “Oh! Well ’ it , WELL ’IT!” yelled Puggy. “Oh! Gow on, gow on agen! Run it aht . Run it AH-T.”
    Ginger gave it up, and turned his attention to the match.
    It was not any famous struggle that was being fought out on the old Ailesworth Ground; it was only second-class cricket, the deciding