“Gang aff awa’ wi’ ye, quietly back up the Spittal,” exclaimed the supervisor, “and leave the seizure to us.”
“Na, faith,” replied Shaw; “ye’ll get jist what we care to gie!”
“Say ye so?” returned the excise officer hotly. “I’ll hae the whole or nane!”
The blood rose in Shaw’s head, and swelled out the veins of his temples. “By God,” he swore, “I’ll shoot every gauger here before ye’ll get a drap!”
The supervisor was a small man with a bold spirit. He turned to his cavalry escort with the order “Fire!” and at the same time reached for Shaw’s collar, with the exclamation, “Ye’ve given me the slip often enough, Shaw! Yield now, I’ve a pistol in each pocket of my breeches.”
“Have ye so?” coolly returned the immense and statuesque Shaw, “it’s no’ lang they’ll be there, then!” and with that he laid violent hands upon each pocket and so picked the exciseman bodily out of his saddle, tore out both pistols and pockets, and then pitched him, as easily as an ordinary man could have done a baby, head over heels into a snow-drift.
Meanwhile, the soldiers had not fired; rightly considering that, as they were so greatly outnumbered, to do so would be only the signal for an affray in which they would surely be worsted. A wordy wrangle then followed, in which the exciseman and the soldiers pointed out that they could not possibly go back empty-handed; and in the end, Shaw and his brother smugglers went their way, leaving four kegs behind, “just out o’ ceeveelity,” and as some sort of salve for the wounded honour of the law and its armed coadjutors.
Not many gaugers were so lion-hearted as this; but one, at least, was even more so. This rash hero one day met two smugglers in a solitary situation. They had a cart loaded up with whisky-kegs, and when the official, unaided, and with no human help near, proposed single-handed to seize their consignment and to arrest them, they must have been as genuinely astonished as ever men have been. The daring man stood there, purposeful of doing his duty, and really in grave danger of his life; but these two smugglers, relishing the humour of the thing, merely descended from their cart, and, seizing him and binding him hand and foot, sat him down in the middle of the road with wrists tied over his knees and a stick through the crook of his legs, in the “trussed fowl” fashion. There, in the middle of the highway, they proposed to leave him; but when he pitifully entreated not to be left there, as he might be run over and killed in the dark, they considerately carried him to the roadside; with saturnine humour remarking that he would probably be starved there instead, before he would be noticed.
The flood-tide of Government prosecutions of the “sma’ stills” was reached in 1823–5, when an average of one thousand four hundred cases annually was reached. These were variously for actual distilling, or for the illegal possession of malt, for which offence very heavy penalties were exacted.