s readers. Garvey did not like the
paper, and young Strong disliked Garvey very much; but the two men had
kept on fairly good terms--not so rigid good terms, of course, as to
forbid their expressing to third parties the frankest contempt for
each other. The Judge had here the advantage, for Strong despised him
indignantly, as a knave, while he despised Strong--or said he
did--pityingly, as a fool. He must, however, have at bottom honored
the young fellow with some serious antipathy; for it was after all no
laughing matter that a boy of twenty-five should come into "his Gaul,
which he had conquered by arms," and filch away his home paper from
under his very eyes. Moreover, though people read the editorials,
laughed, and voted with the Judge just the same--they still did read
them. However, Judge Garvey certainly was more civil to Strong than
Strong was to him.

As for Uncle Billy Green, his rank was due not only to his connection
with the "first shanty" (a house of entertainment at the point where
a trail turned from the river toward the mines), but to his having
remained steadily on the spot ever since, putting up a larger
building at intervals as the settlement gathered around him, until
now he was proprietor of the American Eagle Hotel, a house of goodly
dimensions and generous equipment--billiard-room, bowling alley,
shooting-gallery. Nor did Uncle Billy Green own and conduct this house
in a purely business spirit; a more modest one would have been more
profitable; he liked to "do that much for the town." A man by the name
of Gulliver had established the old rope-ferry, before the day of
bridges, but it was naturally called Green's Ferry, being a ferry at
Green's place. He had been of an undoubted valor in the Indian fights
of early days, was full of reminiscences, had no personal objections
to anybody or anything, and had long given over to Judge Garvey the
trouble of forming his opinions.

Judge Garvey and young Strong were pretty sure to be put upon such
boards or committees as the local affairs of the small town demanded;
and in local matters they proved to pull together fairly well, however
at odds they were politically. But in the end it was not over
politics, but over the district school, that they fell out squarely.
They were both trustees, and as Green was the third, the board seemed
in little danger from any too radical reforming tendencies young
Strong might be guilty of, and the Judge had no thought of