Every so often the small town of the West turns the regular party out of office and puts in a Citizens' ticket, just to show that the people still rule, and to let the greedy officeholders, some of whom get as much as one hundred dollars a year in salary, know that their offices are not life positions. When Attorney Toole descended on Kilo, the Citizens' Party was “in,” and the Republicans were “out,” and the attorney saw an opportunity of making himself valuable to his party by working to put the party “in” again.
Never before had the Colonel climbed his stairs, and Toole smiled like an Irish sphinx when the Colonel entered his office. He smiled most of the time, not because he thought a smile becoming to his freckled face, but because he found things so eternally amusing. In law a man is considered innocent until he has been proved guilty; in Kilo Attorney Toole considered everything amusing until it had been proved serious, and he considered the Colonel and Skinner, and the whole Citizens' Party they had been instrumental in organizing, as parts of the same joke. They would stand until he was ready to lazily push out his hand and topple them over. It was almost time to topple them, now, and he was glad to see the Colonel; he motioned him to a seat, and smiled.
The Colonel took his hat from his mat of coarse iron-gray hair, and laid it carefully on the floor. Out of his small sharp eyes ignorance and cunning peered, and the mass of beard that hid the greater part of his face could not hide the hard line of his mouth.
“I jest dropped up,” he explained, after he had acknowledged the attorney's cheerful greeting with a gruff “mornin',” “I jest dropped up, sort of friendly-like, thinkin' you might have nothin' to do, an' might like to sit an' chin a while. You don't charge nothin' for sittin' an' chinnin' do ye?”
Toole said he did not.
“I didn't figger you did,” said the Colonel. “If I'd thought you did I wouldn't have dropped up, for I ain't got no money to spend on lawyers. I'd sooner throw money away than spend it at law. But I figgered you was young at the law yet, and didn't have much to do at it, and I sort of run across a case I thought might amuse you, like, when you ain't got nothin' to do. Folks don't seem to have much faith in young lawyers, and you can't blame 'em; old ones don't know much. All any of 'em care for is to get people into trouble so they can charge 'em fees to get 'em out of it. So I thought mebby you'd like to hear of this case so you could kind of mull it over in your mind whilst you're loafin' up here.”
“That was kind of you,” said Toole.
“I always like to do a good turn when I can,” said the Colonel, “when it don't cost nothin'. An' this case I was tellin' you about is a mighty good one for a young lawyer to study over. Soon as I heard of it I says to myself 'I'll tell this case to Attorney Toole, an' he'll be grateful to hear of it.'”
The country client usually begins in some such way as this, anxious to get all the advice he can without having to pay for it, and Toole merely smiled.
“Mebby you know,” said the Colonel, “that there was a feller took board of Sally Briggs a while back; feller by the name of William Rossiter, that come through here peddlin' lightnin' rods and pain killer and land knows what all. Well, he was a rascal. He took board off of Sally Briggs four weeks, and then he cleared out, and she nor no one else has seen hide nor hair of him since, and he never paid her one cent. All he ever let on was to leave this letter stickin' on the pin cushion in his bedroom.”