Phil openly commented on the peculiarity, but Jim just stuck his tongue in his cheek.
Neither McLean nor the wounded half-breed were seriously hurt, and in a week both were well again––the one going lamely about his business and the other in jail beside his fellows.
The trial was placed on the calendar for the next Assizes which had been arranged for the following month, when most of the Fall crops would be in and shipped, thereby leaving twelve good men and true free to devote some of their time to the requirements of law and justice.
Jim went back again to the Court House as Government Agent Thompson’s assistant. Phil kept to the forge, serious and tremendously earnest in following the calling he had been so strangely thrust into.
He could not fail to notice, day by day, the gradual change that was coming over Sol Hanson. Sol had not been drunk for weeks. He dressed himself much more neatly than formerly, although what it was exactly that gave him the smarter appearance, Phil could not make out until Smiler led him to understand by signs and grimaces that Sol now washed his face and hands mornings 191 and evenings, instead of every Sunday morning as formerly.
But there was something else.
Sol’s blue eyes had contracted a habit of gazing into the heart of the fire while he leaned abstractedly on the bellows handle. He became interested in the train arrivals. He posted letters and called every day at the post office for mail. Whether he got any or not Phil was unable to say definitely. But he got a sneaking suspicion after a while, that the soft-hearted, simple, big fellow was either answering letters through the Seattle Matrimonial Times, or corresponding with some lady friend. He felt convinced that Sol was badly, or rather, madly in love.
He probed the big Swede with the sharp end of a question now and again, but Sol was wonderfully impervious.
One day, Jim and Phil were strolling leisurely up Main Street from the Kenora Hotel where they had been having an early lunch together. The north train had just come in and a few drummers, some incoming Chinamen and a number of straggling passengers were spreading themselves for their different destinations, carrying grips and canvas bags with their samples and their belongings as the case might be.
Neither Jim nor Phil was paying any heed to what was a daily occurrence, until they were stopped by a buxom, fair-haired, blue-eyed maiden, with a pleasant smile on her big, innocent face. She was cheaply but becomingly dressed and filled her clothes with attractive generosity. As she laid down her two hand-bags, her smile broadened and beamed until it broke into a merry dimple on each of her cheeks and parted her ruddy lips to the exposure of a mouthful of fresh, creamy-looking, well-formed teeth.