"Well, I made that man. When I first ran against McCormick he was working in the mines up in Tuolumne, with the water squelching in his boots. In those days a dollar to Jerry looked about as big as a cart-wheel. His wife was glad enough to do a little washing, and his daughter--the youngest ones weren't born then, but the eldest, the one that married the English lord, was--used to run round barefoot, and bring her father his dinner in a tin pail." "I'm sure she doesn't know what a tin pail is now," said Gault, a mental picture rising in his mind of the magnificent Lady Courtley as he had seen her on her last visit to her parents. "No," said the old man; "I hear she's one of the Vere de Veres. And I can remember her, a little freckled-faced kid with her hair in her eyes, hanging round the tunnel of the Little Bertha, waiting to give her father his dinner." "Do you know the younger McCormick girls, Miss Reed? Lady Courtley was before your time," said Gault, in an attempt to draw Viola into the conversation. She looked surprised, and then gave a little laugh and shook her head. "I've never even seen them," she answered. "Oh, they don't know Viola," said the colonel--not with bitterness, but as one who states a simple and natural fact; "the old woman's educated them out of all that. But, as I was saying, I made their father. He'd managed to scrape together a little pile, put it all in a small prospect, and lost every nickel. He was just about dead broke, and came to me crying--yes, crying--and said, 'Colonel Reed, there's only one man in California whose advice I'd follow and whose opinion I'd trust.' 'Who's that?' said I, intending to help the poor devil to the best of my ability. 'It's Ramsay Reed,' said he. 'Well,' said I, 'if you'll just put yourself in my hands, and do what I tell you, I'll set you on your feet.' 'Colonel,' said he, 'say the word, and whatever it is, it goes. You've got more financial ability in your little finger than all the rest of 'em have in their whole bodies.' So I took him in hand." The colonel paused, a reflective smile wrinkling the skin at the corners of his eyes. "You certainly seem to have made a success of his case," said Gault, feeling that some comment was expected of him.