Christie looked up from her book; pretended he had spoken to her, gave a fictitious yawn, and renewed the negotiation with the air of one disposed to kill time.
She was dying for the story.
Commerce was twice broken off and renewed by each power in turn.
At last the bargain was struck at fourteen-pence.
Then Flucker came out, the honest merchant.
He had listened intently, with mercantile views.
He had the widow's sorrows all off pat.
He was not a bit affected himself, but by pure memory he remembered where she had been most agitated or overcome.
He gave it Christie, word for word, and even threw in what dramatists call "the business," thus: "Here ye suld greet--" "Here ye'll play your hand like a geraffe." "Geraffe?
That's a beast, I'm thinking." "Na; it's the thing on the hill that makes signals." "Telegraph, ye fulish goloshen!" "Oo ay, telegraph! Geraffe 's sunest said for a'." Thus Jess Rutherford's life came into Christie Johnstone's hands.
She told it to a knot of natives next day; it lost nothing, for she was a woman of feeling, and by intuition an artist of the tongue.

She was the best _raconteur_ in a place where there are a hundred, male and female, who attempt that art.
The next day she told it again, and then inferior narrators got hold of it, and it soon circulated through the town.
And this was the cause of the sudden sympathy with Jess Rutherford.
As our prigs would say: "Art had adopted her cause and adorned her tale.".