34. CHAPTER XXXIV.
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.