The mountains are very high and steep about Carson, Eagle and
Washoe Valleys—very high and very steep, and so when the snow
gets to melting off fast in the Spring and the warm surface-earth
begins to moisten and soften, the disastrous land-slides
commence. The reader cannot know what a land-slide is, unless he
has lived in that country and seen the whole side of a mountain
taken off some fine morning and deposited down in the valley,
leaving a vast, treeless, unsightly scar upon the mountain’s
front to keep the circumstance fresh in his memory all the years
that he may go on living within seventy miles of that place.
General Buncombe was shipped out to Nevada in the invoice of
Territorial officers, to be United States Attorney. He considered
himself a lawyer of parts, and he very much wanted an opportunity
to manifest it—partly for the pure gratification of it and
partly because his salary was Territorially meagre (which is a
strong expression). Now the older citizens of a new territory
look down upon the rest of the world with a calm, benevolent
compassion, as long as it keeps out of the way—when it gets in
the way they snub it. Sometimes this latter takes the shape of a
practical joke.
One morning Dick Hyde rode furiously up to General Buncombe’s
door in Carson city and rushed into his presence without stopping
to tie his horse. He seemed much excited. He told the General
that he wanted him to conduct a suit for him and would pay him
five hundred dollars if he achieved a victory. And then, with
violent gestures and a world of profanity, he poured out his
grief. He said it was pretty well known that for some years he
had been farming (or ranching as the more customary term is) in
Washoe District, and making a successful thing of it, and
furthermore it was known that his ranch was situated just in the
edge of the valley, and that Tom Morgan owned a ranch immediately
above it on the mountain side.
And now the trouble was, that one of those hated and dreaded
land-slides had come and slid Morgan’s ranch, fences, cabins,
cattle, barns and everything down on top of his ranch and exactly
covered up every single vestige of his property, to a depth of
about thirty-eight feet. Morgan was in possession and refused to
vacate the premises—said he was occupying his own cabin and not
interfering with anybody else’s—and said the cabin was standing
on the same dirt and same ranch it had always stood on, and he
would like to see anybody make him vacate.
“And when I reminded him,” said Hyde, weeping, “that it was on
top of my ranch and that he was trespassing, he had the infernal
meanness to ask me why didn’t I stay on my ranch and hold
possession when I see him a-coming! Why didn’t I stay on it, the
blathering lunatic—by George, when I heard that racket and
looked up that hill it was just like the whole world was
a-ripping and a-tearing down that mountain side—splinters, and
cord-wood, thunder and lightning, hail and snow, odds and ends of
hay stacks, and awful clouds of dust!—trees going end over end
in the air, rocks as big as a house jumping ‘bout a thousand feet
high and busting into ten million pieces, cattle turned inside
out and a-coming head on with their tails hanging out between
their teeth!—and in the midst of all that wrack and destruction
sot that cussed Morgan on his gate-post, a-wondering why I didn’t
stay and hold possession! Laws bless me, I just took one glimpse,
General, and lit out’n the county in three jumps exactly.
“But what grinds me is that that Morgan hangs on there and
won’t move off’n that ranch—says it’s his’n and he’s going to
keep it—likes it better’n he did when it was higher up the hill.
Mad! Well, I’ve been so mad for two days I couldn’t find my way
to town—been wandering around in the brush in a starving
condition—got anything here to drink, General? But I’m here now,
and I’m a-going to law. You hear me!”
Never in all the world, perhaps, were a man’s feelings so
outraged as were the General’s. He said he had never heard of
such high-handed conduct in all his life as this Morgan’s. And he
said there was no use in going to law—Morgan had no shadow of
right to remain where he was—nobody in the wide world would
uphold him in it, and no lawyer would take his case and no judge
listen to it. Hyde said that right there was where he was
mistaken—everybody in town sustained Morgan; Hal Brayton, a very
smart lawyer, had taken his case; the courts being in vacation,
it was to be tried before a referee, and ex-Governor Roop had
already been appointed to that office and would open his court in
a large public hall near the hotel at two that afternoon.
The General was amazed. He said he had suspected before that
the people of that Territory were fools, and now he knew it. But
he said rest easy, rest easy and collect the witnesses, for the
victory was just as certain as if the conflict were already over.
Hyde wiped away his tears and left.
At two in the afternoon referee Roop’s Court opened and Roop
appeared throned among his sheriffs, the witnesses, and
spectators, and wearing upon his face a solemnity so
awe-inspiring that some of his fellow-conspirators had
misgivings that maybe he had not comprehended, after all, that
this was merely a joke. An unearthly stillness prevailed, for at
the slightest noise the judge uttered sternly the command:
“Order in the Court!”
And the sheriffs promptly echoed it. Presently the General
elbowed his way through the crowd of spectators, with his arms
full of law-books, and on his ears fell an order from the judge
which was the first respectful recognition of his high official
dignity that had ever saluted them, and it trickled pleasantly
through his whole system:
“Way for the United States Attorney!”
The witnesses were called—legislators, high government
officers, ranchmen, miners, Indians, Chinamen, negroes. Three
fourths of them were called by the defendant Morgan, but no
matter, their testimony invariably went in favor of the plaintiff
Hyde. Each new witness only added new testimony to the absurdity
of a man’s claiming to own another man’s property because his
farm had slid down on top of it. Then the Morgan lawyers made
their speeches, and seemed to make singularly weak ones—they
did really nothing to help the Morgan cause. And now the General,
with exultation in his face, got up and made an impassioned
effort; he pounded the table, he banged the law-books, he
shouted, and roared, and howled, he quoted from everything and
everybody, poetry, sarcasm, statistics, history, pathos, bathos,
blasphemy, and wound up with a grand war-whoop for free speech,
freedom of the press, free schools, the Glorious Bird of America
and the principles of eternal justice! [Applause.]
When the General sat down, he did it with the conviction that
if there was anything in good strong testimony, a great speech
and believing and admiring countenances all around, Mr. Morgan’s
case was killed. Ex-Governor Roop leant his head upon his hand
for some minutes, thinking, and the still audience waited for his
decision. Then he got up and stood erect, with bended head, and
thought again. Then he walked the floor with long, deliberate
strides, his chin in his hand, and still the audience waited. At
last he returned to his throne, seated himself, and began
impressively:
“Gentlemen, I feel the great responsibility that rests upon me
this day. This is no ordinary case. On the contrary it is plain
that it is the most solemn and awful that ever man was called
upon to decide. Gentlemen, I have listened attentively to the
evidence, and have perceived that the weight of it, the
overwhelming weight of it, is in favor of the plaintiff Hyde. I
have listened also to the remarks of counsel, with high
interest—and especially will I commend the masterly and
irrefutable logic of the distinguished gentleman who represents
the plaintiff. But gentlemen, let us beware how we allow mere
human testimony, human ingenuity in argument and human ideas of
equity, to influence us at a moment so solemn as this. Gentlemen,
it ill becomes us, worms as we are, to meddle with the decrees of
Heaven. It is plain to me that Heaven, in its inscrutable wisdom,
has seen fit to move this defendant’s ranch for a purpose. We are
but creatures, and we must submit. If Heaven has chosen to favor
the defendant Morgan in this marked and wonderful manner; and if
Heaven, dissatisfied with the position of the Morgan ranch upon
the mountain side, has chosen to remove it to a position more
eligible and more advantageous for its owner, it ill becomes us,
insects as we are, to question the legality of the act or inquire
into the reasons that prompted it. No—Heaven created the ranches
and it is Heaven’s prerogative to rearrange them, to experiment
with them around at its pleasure. It is for us to submit, without
repining.
“I warn you that this thing which has happened is a thing with
which the sacrilegious hands and brains and tongues of men must
not meddle. Gentlemen, it is the verdict of this court that the
plaintiff, Richard Hyde, has been deprived of his ranch by the
visitation of God! And from this decision there is no
appeal.”
Buncombe seized his cargo of law-books and plunged out of the
court-room frantic with indignation. He pronounced Roop to be a
miraculous fool, an inspired idiot. In all good faith he returned
at night and remonstrated with Roop upon his extravagant
decision, and implored him to walk the floor and think for half
an hour, and see if he could not figure out some sort of
modification of the verdict. Roop yielded at last and got up to
walk. He walked two hours and a half, and at last his face lit up
happily and he told Buncombe it had occurred to him that the
ranch underneath the new Morgan ranch still belonged to Hyde,
that his title to the ground was just as good as it had ever
been, and therefore he was of opinion that Hyde had a right to
dig it out from under there and—
The General never waited to hear the end of it. He was always
an impatient and irascible man, that way. At the end of two
months the fact that he had been played upon with a joke had
managed to bore itself, like another Hoosac Tunnel, through the
solid adamant of his understanding.
