“To make a long story short we got Jacobs, the best lawyer on them sort of cases in Kam City, and he puts up such a talk for her, a-quotin’ Scripture and so on, that he had everybody in the courtroom except the district crown attorney wipin’ the corners of their eyes. He winds up by statin’ there was a party who was prepared to start her off fresh on a decent job. The old magistrate was so taken with Jacob’s speil he said he thought she hadn’t had a chance, and, after a lecture to her on the straight and narrow path, he lets her off without even the suspended sentence the crown attorney tried to horn in with as a last resort.
“It was Jacobs turned the girl and her mother loose on me when they insisted on thanking the man who’d put up the money to defend her, and in a weak moment, bein’ kind of flustered, I promised to take them to him. I’ll never forget what happened when I took them out to the old camp layout on the tug. As I said, the girl was rather a good-lookin’ kid and she hadn’t commenced to get that hard jib women who go under seem to take on. She seemed still kind of dazed over it all when I walked her and her mother into the superintendent’s office. ‘There’s the man,’ says I before I had yet thought just what I was doing. ‘There’s the man you can thank for savin’ you from the clink.’
“The Big Boss he scowls at me as black as thunder and I knew I’d put my foot in it for fair, but the girl breaks down and falls at his feet, a-sobbin’ that she wasn’t worth savin’. In sort of hysterics she was. For once the Big Boss seemed like he didn’t know what to do. He looked around wild-eyed as though he’d like to beat it out the door. But he couldn’t, because in her little cryin’ fit she’d taken a strangle hold on his boots. So he lifts her up and chucks her into her mother’s arms.
“‘Get up, girl,’ he cries kind of hoarse and bashful-like. ‘I ain’t your judge, and if you’ve done any wrong I don’t know anything about it and don’t want to. The North Star’s goin’ to offer you a job, and Macdougal here has the lookin’ after of that. Go straight, girl,’ he adds, fixin’ her with them flashin’ coal-black eyes of his, ‘and if any one throws this thing up at you again let us know about it and there’ll be little old hell to pay!’