-and this was
Aleck Thompson, the Sheriff of the county, a jovial man past middle age,
a rubicund bachelor, who had courted half the girls in the county and
was intimate with more than half the people in the circuit. He was
daring even to rashness. He had held the office of Sheriff--not so long,
perhaps, as the Judge had sat on the bench, but, at least, since he
first stood for the place; and he could hold it as long as he wished it.
He was easily the most popular man in the county. He treated everybody
with unvarying joviality and indiscriminate generosity, and it was known
that his income, though large, was, except so much as was absolutely
necessary for his support, distributed with impartial fairness among the
people of his county, a part over the poker-table, a part over the bar,
and the balance in other popular ways. He had a face that no one could
read, and bluffed as well with a pair of treys as with four aces. But
he used to say that such a bluff was to be used rarely, and only on
important occasions.

Now and then some opposition to him would arise and a small headway
would be made against him. As, for instance, after he advised Squire
Jefford's plump and comely daughter, Mary, not to marry Dick Creel,
because Dick was too dissipated. There were some who said that the
Sheriff had designs himself on Sam Jefford's buxom, black-eyed daughter,
while others held that he was afraid of young Dick, who was an amiable
and popular young fellow, and that he did not want him to get too much
influence in the lower end of the county. However it was, Mary Jefford
not only married her young lover, but sobered him, and as she was young,
pretty, and ambitious, and worshipped her husband, Dick Creel at the
next election, to use the vernacular, "made cornsideruble show runnin'
ag'inst the Sheriff, and give him cornsideruble trouble." Still,
Thompson was elected overwhelmingly, and few people believed Mary
Creel's charge that the Sheriff had got Dick drunk on purpose to beat
him. Thompson said, "Did n't anybody have to _git_ Dick drunk--the work
was t'other way."

II

The session of the Circuit Court in the "------ year of the
Commonwealth," as the writs ran, and "in the sixteenth year of Aleck
Thompson's Sheriffalty," as that official used to say, was more than
usually important. The noted case of "_Dolittle et al. vs. Dolittle's
Executrix_" was tried at the autumn term of the court, and caused
considerable excitement i