“I am just about to open court, Mr. Storefield. Would you mind taking a few cases with me this morning?”

We went into the courthouse just for a lark. There was old George sitting on the bench as grave as a judge, and a rattling good magistrate he made, too. He disagreed from the Commissioner once or twice, and showed him where he was right, too, not in the law, but in the facts of the case, where George’s knowing working men and their ways gave him the pull. He wasn’t over sharp and hard either, like some men directly they’re raised up a bit, just to show their power. But just seemed to do a fair thing, neither too much one way or the other. George stayed and had lunch at the camp with the Commissioner when the court was adjourned, and he drove away afterwards with his upstanding eighty-guinea horse—horses was horses in those days—just as good a gentleman to look at as anybody. Of course we knew there was a difference, and he’d never get over a few things he’d missed when he was young, in the way of education. But he was liked and respected for all that, and made welcome everywhere. He was a man as didn’t push himself one bit. There didn’t seem anything but his money and his good-natured honest face, and now and then a bit of a clumsy joke, to make him a place. But when the swells make up their minds to take a man in among themselves they’re not half as particular as commoner people; they do a thing well when they’re about it.

So George was hail-fellow-well-met with all the swells at the camp, and the bankers and big storekeepers, and the doctors and lawyers and clergymen, all the nobs there were at the Turon; and when the Governor himself and his lady came up on a visit to see what the place was like, why George was taken up and introduced as if he’d been a regular blessed curiosity in the way of contractors, and his Excellency hadn’t set eyes on one before.

“My word! Dick,” says Jim,“it’s a murder he and Aileen didn’t cotton to one another in the old days. She’d have been just the girl to have fancied all this sort of swell racket, with a silk gown and dressed up a bit. There isn’t a woman here that’s a patch on her for looks, is there now, except Jeanie, and she’s different in her ways.”