More than forty years before the time of which I speak, Granny Stirk, then a strikingly handsome young woman, lived with her husband in the cottage which was still her home. Stirk, a cadger well known on the road for his blasphemous tongue and the joyfulness of his Saturday nights, was reported to be afraid of his wife, and it is certain that, but for her strong hand and good sense, he would have been a much less successful member of society. As it was, he managed to lead an almost decent life, and was killed, while still a young man, in an accident.
Mrs. Stirk thus found herself a widow, with two little boys under ten, a cart, a couple of angular horses, and no male relations; in spite of the trouble she had had with him, she missed her man, and, after his funeral, prepared herself to contend with two things—poverty and the dulness of life. She cared little for the company of her own sex, and the way in which her widowhood cut her off from the world of men and movement galled and wearied her. So it was from inclination as well as necessity that she one day mounted the cart in her husband’s vacant place, and appeared at Kaims after the boats came in, to be greeted with the inevitable jeers. But the jeers could not stop her shrewd purchasing, nor alter the fact that she had iron nerves and a natural judgment of pace, and in the market she was soon let alone as one with whom it was unprofitable to bandy words. For curses she cared little, having heard too many; to her they were light things to encounter in the fight for her bread, her children, and the joy of life.
Her position became assured one day, when, after a time of scarcity in the fish-market, a good haul held out the prospect of an unusual sale inland. A string of cadgers who had started before Mrs. Stirk were well out on the road when she appeared from a short-cut considered unfit for wheels, and, having hung shrewdly to their skirts, passed them just outside Blackport, her heels on the shaft, her whip ostentatiously idle, and her gold earrings swinging in her ears.
When her eldest son was of an age to help her, he ran away to sea; and when she gave up the reins to the second, she retired to the ordinary feminine life of her class with the nickname of the ‘Queen of the Cadgers’ and a heavier purse. Behind her were a dozen years of hard work. When her successor died, as his father had done, in the prime of life, the sailor son, as a sort of rough payment for his own desertion, sent his boy Jimmy to take his place; the arrangement suited Mrs. Stirk, and her grandson took kindly to his trade. They had spent a couple of years together when Gilbert Speid came into their lives as owner of the land on which their cottage stood.
Lady Eliza remained in her saddle for the whole of the sale, though Fullarton put his horse in the stable. She beckoned to Gilbert to join them, and the two men stood by her until the business was over and the crowd began to disperse. They rode homewards together, their roads being identical for a few miles, threading their way through the led horses, driven cattle, and humanity which the end of the ‘roup’ had let loose. Jimmy Stirk passed them on his new acquisition, for he had flung himself on its back to try its paces, leaving his grandmother to follow at her leisure.
‘Did you buy that horse for the saddle or for harness?’ inquired Fullarton, as the boy passed them.
‘He is not mine,’ replied Gilbert. ‘It was young Stirk who bought him.’
‘But surely I heard the auctioneer knock him down to you?’
‘I outbid him by two pounds. He had not enough, so I added that on for him. I never saw anyone so much in earnest as he was,’ explained Gilbert.
Fullarton was silent, and Lady Eliza looked curiously at the young man.