General O'Reilly flew away from Ireland with a mist in his eyes and a great glow in his heart. In a shaven second, he had achieved the thing for which long and gallant generations of earlier O'Reillys had fought bloodily and in vain. For a fleeting moment, he wondered if his nervous right hand that day had shown any subconscious partisanship, but rejected the thing as impossible. If the toss for the Six Counties was, in a way, the crowning peak of General O'Reilly's career, it was by no means the end of it. Both he and his coin were fast becoming settled tradition. He continued his normal military career, but with the tacit understanding he would have a few days' leave of absence whenever the Golden Judge was needed.
He took it to Stockholm for the toss that settled the old and bitter fishing controversy between Britain and Iceland. Britain won.
He took it to Cairo, where Britain and Greece tossed for Cyprus. Greece won, and at once offered Britain all the bases she wanted there, and granted special extraterritorial status to all British colonels, knights' widows and former governors of the Punjab living in retirement on the island.
He got his third star just before he flew down to Rio de Janiero for the toss that finally settled the nagging quarrel between Britain and Argentina as to who owned the Falkland Islands. Britain won.
He took it to The Hague in Holland for the toss about the Saar. The Saar had remained a European sore point despite a series of Franco-German "settlements" which never seemed to settle anything. Germany won the toss, and immediately, of her own free will, granted the French equal commercial rights.
The Saar toss had two odd results. The first was purely personal for General O'Reilly, but he never forgot it. One day, driving through The Hague, his official car passed a huge dignified building, which his chauffeur explained was the World Court. With a strange feeling, the general noticed a solemn old man in black, staring bleakly out the window. He realized suddenly it was probably a judge, and that the golden coin in his pocket had turned this costly mechanism into an anachronism. Nobody used the World Court any more now.
The other result of the Saar toss was, from the viewpoint of world jurisprudence, far more important. It transformed the Golden Judge from a mere tradition into an established legal institution, in this manner:
