“Papa, it is my fault; I gave it to King Billy.”

Colborn turned round and took her up, letting fall the hat as he did so.  Billy made a jump, picked it up, and, in his agitation, brushed it carefully the wrong way.

“My dear, if you gave it to him it’s all right.  But why didn’t the old fool tell me?”

“He’s not an old fool, papa, and you must not say so.  He’s a good man, and I think he thought you would be angry with me.  Didn’t you, King Billy?” And the king, with a smile of conscious rectitude, admitted it was so.

Mr. Colborn gave him sixpence; and he gave Annie a great many kisses, declaring, with uncommon thoughtlessness, that whatever she did was right, and that she could give the king all his house, and Australia to boot.  Whereon King Billy smiled a smile that was portentous, and showed his teeth to the uttermost recesses of his ample mouth.  Looking down, he surveyed the rest of his clothes, which in parts resembled the child’s definition of a net as a lot of holes tied together with string, and, looking up, he inspected Mr. Colborn as if estimating the resources of his wardrobe.  But being urgently smitten with the necessity of getting rid of his sixpence, he shambled off into the town.  Other matters might wait; that admitted of no delay.

The mind of King Billy was not a big mind; it would no more have taken in an abstract idea than his gunyah would have accommodated a grand piano.  He was as simple as sunlight, and to resolve his intellect into seven colours would want the most ingenious spectroscope.  But he could make an inference from a positive fact, and, having made it, he did not allow more remote deductions to trouble his legitimate conclusion.  He ceased to fear Mr. Colborn, and began to look upon the magistrate’s property as if it were at least half his own.  So he got very drunk on the hospitality of a new chum miner who had been successful, and presently, presuming on his new possessions, got into a fight with his entertainer and a disrespectful subking of his own blacks, and was reduced to worse rags than ever.

Next morning he sat outside the magistrate’s house, on the lowest log he could find, and when Mr. Colborn came out he tackled him with the air of a subject king demanding redress of his suzerain.

“Well, Billy, what is it?” asked the suzerain.

“You belong gublement?” said Billy the king, with a question, an implied doubt, and a great complaint in his voice.  Colborn laughed.

“Why, yes, Billy; I belong to the government, I suppose.”

“Then,” said Billy, “what you say to white fellow make ’um black fellow drunk, knock ’um all about?  Call you that gublement?” And he showed his kingly robe, which had once been a frock-coat, with great disgust.

However, he met with no favour, and was told that he should not get drunk—­that it served him right; with which magisterial decision Colborn got on his horse and rode off to the flat.