"I came on this trip," said Colonel Baggs, "to rest my vocal organs, and
not to talk. In this ambition I have been greatly aided by the
willingness of Professor Boggs to assume the conversational burden in
our seat. However, now that my name has been drawn from the hat, I shall
have the pleasure, and honor, lady and gentlemen, to entertain you for a
very few minutes--after which, thanking you for your very kind attention
and liberal patronage, the hay--the hay, my friends, for me!"
At the Lake Hotel, to which they had come by boat, they found their
tents pitched and their dinner awaiting them--for which they were
indebted to the efficiency of Aconite and the Hired Man, who had come
overland; and the latter of whom assured them that they had missed the
greatest curiosity of the Park in failing to see the Natural Bridge.
"On your way, Bill!" said the Groom. "You didn't see the petrified sea
serpent swimming off Gull Point, did you?"
"Dumb it all, no!" exclaimed Bill. "I never am around when anything good
is pulled off!"
THE LAW AND AMELIA WHINNERY
THE TALE OF COLONEL BAGGS OF OMAHA
I was much interested (said the Colonel, beginning his story), in the
tale told by my learned brother, Mr. Snoke. The story of the way Mr.
Lungy Addison committed grand larceny in getting away with the Mortal
Cinch mine is one that, falling from the mouth, as it does, of a person
not learned in the law and its beauties, must be true. Nobody but a
lawyer could have invented it--and I assure you that lawyers are too
busy with the strange phases of truth to monkey--if I may use a term not
yet laundered by the philologists--with fiction. The law is the
perfection of human wisdom. Our courts are the God-ordained instruments
by which these perfections are made manifest to the eyes of mere human
beings. To be sure the courts are composed of men who were but even now
lawyers--but that's neither here, there, nor yonder--when the anointment
of their judicial consecration runs down their beard, as did the oil
down that of Aaron, human imperfections are at end with them, and it's
all off with frailty. And this brings me to the brief story which is my
contribution to the Yellowstone Nights' Entertainment. I sing, my
beloved, the saga of The Law and Amelia Whinnery.
I just got a decision over in Nebraska in the case of Whinnery _vs._ The
C. & S. W. It shows that Providence is still looking out for the
righteous man and his seed. Never heard of Whinnery _vs._ the Railway
Company? Well, it may put you wise to a legal principle or two, and I'll
tell you about it. I was ag'in' the corporations over there, as
associate counsel for the plaintiff. Bob Fink, that studied in my
office, was the fellow the case belonged to, and he being a little
afraid of Absalom Scales, the railroad's local attorney, sent over a
Macedonian wail to me, and said we'd cut up a fifty per cent, contingent
fee if we won. I went.
Amelia Whinnery was the plaintiff. She was a school-teacher who had got
hold of the physical culture graft, and was teaching it to teachers'
institutes, making forty dollars a minute the year around.
"How much?" asked the Hired Man.
"I'm telling you what the record showed as I remember it," said the
Colonel. "We proved that she was doing right well financially when the
railroad put her out of business by failing to ring a bell or toot a
whistle at the crossing coming into Tovala, and catching Bill Williams'
bus asleep at the switch. Miss Whinnery was in the bus. When it was all
over, she was in pretty fair shape--"
"Naturally," interpolated the Artist.
"Excepting that her nerves had got some kind of a shock and she was
robbed permanently of the power of speech."
"How terrible!" exclaimed the Bride.
On the trial she sat in the court-room in a close-fitting dress, wearing
a picture hat, and would give a dumb sort of gurgle when Scales would
pitch into her case, as if to protest at being so cruelly assaulted
while defenseless. It was pathetic.
Bob Fink shed tears, while he pictured to the jury in his opening, the
agony of this beautiful girl set off from her kind for life, as the
preponderance, the clear preponderance of the evidence showed she would
be, by dumbness--"an affliction, gentlemen of the jury, which seals her
lips forever as to the real facts, and stops the reply she could
otherwise make to the dastardly attack of my honorable and learned
friend, the attorney for this public-service corporation, which has been
clothed with the power to take away your land, gentlemen of the jury, or
mine, whether we want to sell it or not, and to rob us of our produce by
its extortionate freight rates, and to run its trains into and through
our cities, and over our busses, and to maim and injure our ladies, and
bring them before juries of their peers, who, unless I mistake, will
administer a stinging rebuke to this corporation without a soul to save
or a body to kick, in the only way in which it can be made to feel a
rebuke--in damages, out of that surplus of tainted dollars which its
evil and illegal practices have wrung from the hard hands of toil as
represented by the farmers and laborers who so largely compose this
highly-intelligent jury."
"Good spiel," commented the Groom.
Bob was good until the other side had the reporter begin to take his
speech down, so as to show appeals to passion and prejudice--and then he
hugged the record close. The plaintiff sobbed convulsively. Bob stopped
and swallowed, knowing that the reporter couldn't get the sobs and
swallows into the record. The jurors blew their noses and glared at
Scales and the claim-agent. I went over to the plaintiff and gave her a
drink of water, and would have liked to take her in my arms and comfort
her, but didn't.
"Too bad!" remarked the Poet.
Well, the jury found for us in about three hours for the full amount,
ten thousand dollars and costs. They would have agreed earlier, only
they waited so the state would have to pay for their suppers. A judgment
was rendered on the verdict, and the railroad appealed. All this time
Bob was getting more and more tender toward the plaintiff. I didn't
think much about it until cards came for their wedding. I sent Bob an
assignment of my share in the verdict for a wedding present--if we ever
got it. Amelia promised to love, honor and cherish by nodding her head,
and walked away from the altar with her most graceful physical culture
gait, while the boys outside with their shivaree instruments ready for
the evening, sang in unison, "Here comes the bride! Get on to her
stride!" It was a _recherché_ affair--but excessively quiet nuptials on
the bride's side.
That evening Absalom Scales got in the finest piece of work that was
ever pulled off in any lawsuit in Nebraska. The bridal party went away
over the C. & S. W.Omaha Limited, and Amelia and Bob were there looking
as fine as fiddles--Amelia a picture, they said, in her going-away gown.
Scales had fixed up for a crowd of hoodlums to shivaree them as they
went.
"Mighty mean trick, I should say," said the Hired Man, "for any one but
a corporation lawyer."
"Wait, Brother Snoke," protested the Colonel, "until you are so far
advised in the premises as to be able to judge whether the end didn't
justify the means."
In addition to the horse-fiddles and bells and horns, Absalom had
arranged some private theatricals. He had plugged up a deal by which
Bill Williams, the bus man--who'd sold out and was going to Oregon
anyway--came bursting into the waiting-room while they were waiting for
the train--which was held at the water-tank by Scales' procurement and
covin--and presented a bill for the damages to his bus by the accident
which had hurt Amelia's oratorical powers. You see, he'd never been
settled with, being clearly negligent. They tried to get off in Amelia's
case on the doctrine of imputed negligence, but it wouldn't stick.
Well, Bill comes in with his claim against Amelia and Bob for two or
three hundred dollars for his bus. They disdainfully gave him the ha-ha.
"Then," says Bill Williams, "I will tell all, woman!"
Amelia flushed, and looked inquiringly at Bob. Bob walked up to Bill and
hissed: "What do you mean, you hound, by insulting my wife in this way!"
"She knows what I mean," yelled Bill, turning on Amelia. "Ask your wife
what she an' I was talkin' about when we was a-crossing the track that
time. Ask her if she didn't say to me that I was the perfec'ly
perportioned physical man, an' whether I didn't think that men an' women
of sech perportions should mate; an' if she didn't make goo-goo eyes at
me, ontil I stuck back my head to kiss her, an' whether she wasn't
a-kissin' me when that freight come a pirootin' down an' run over her
talkin' apparatus! Ask her if she didn't say she could die a-kissin' me,
an' if she didn't come danged near doin' it!"
"How perfectly horrid!" gasped the Bride.
Well, Bob Fink was, from all accounts, perfectly flabbergasted. There
stood Bill Williams in his old dogskin coat and a cap that reeked of the
stables, and there stood the fair plaintiff, turning redder and redder
and panting louder and louder as the enormity of the thing grew upon
her. And then she turned loose.
Amelia Whinnery Fink, defendant in error, and permanently dumb, turned
loose.
She began doubling up her fists and stamping her feet, and finally she
burst forth into oratory of the most impassioned character.
"Robert Fink!" she said, as quoted in the motion for a reopening of the
case that Scales filed--"Robert Fink, will you stand by like a coward
and see me insulted? That miserable tramp--a perfect--If you don't kill
him, I will. _I_ kiss him? _I_ ask him such a thing? Bob Fink, do you
expect me to go with you and leave such an insult unavenged? No, no, no,
no--"
"I don't blame her!" interjected the Bride.
I guess she'd have gone on stringing negatives together as long as the
depot would have held 'em, if Bob hadn't noticed Ike Witherspoon, the
shorthand reporter, diligently taking down her speech and the names of
those present. Then he twigged, and, hastily knocking Bill down, he
boarded the train with Amelia. He wired me from Fremont that it was all
off with the judgment, as they'd tormented Mrs. Fink into making a
public speech. I answered, collect, bidding him be as happy as he could
in view of the new-found liberty of speech and of the press, and I'd
look after the judgment and the appeal.
"Well," said the Groom, "of course you got licked in the Supreme Court.
It was clear proof that she'd been shamming."
"You're about as near right on that as might be expected of a layman,"
retorted the Colonel. "Just about. The law is the perfection of human
reason. The jury had found that Amelia Whinnery couldn't speak, and
never would be able to. A jury had rendered a verdict to that effect,
and judgment for ten thousand dollars had been entered upon it. I merely
pointed out to the Supreme Court that they could consider errors in the
record only, and that it was the grossest sort of pettifogging and
ignorance of the law for Absalom Scales to come in and introduce such an
impertinence as evidence--after the evidence was closed--that the fair
plaintiff had been shamming and was, in fact, a very free-spoken lady.
The bench saw the overpowering logic of this, and read my authorities,
and Bob and Amelia will henceforth live in the best house in their town,
built out of the C. & S .W. surplus--and Amelia talking sixteen hours a
day. It's locally regarded as a good joke on the railroad."
"But was it honest?" queried the Bride.
"Honest, me lady!" repeated the Colonel, _a la_ Othello. "My dear young
lady, the courts are not to be criticized--ever remember that!"
* * * * *
"That makes me think," said the Hired Man, "of the darndest thing--"
"In that case," said the Poet, "your name will be considered drawn for
the next number. Save this darndest thing for its own occasion--which
will be at our next camp. Oneiros beckons, and I go."
"In that case," said Aconite, "I'd go, you bet!"