Bert Wilson on the Gridiron

by J. W. Duffield

"What happened to the man who did the shooting?" asked Bert.

"Well, O'Day wasn't what you'd call a very popular character," replied Mr. Melton, "and nobody felt very much cut up over his sudden exit from this vale of tears. They got up an impromptu jury, but the twelve 'good men and true' failed to find the defendant guilty."

"But how did they get around it?" asked Tom. "There was no doubt about who did the killing, was there?"

"Not the least in the world," replied Mr. Melton with a laugh; "but as I say, popular sentiment was with the man who did the shooting, so the jury turned in a verdict that ran something in this fashion, if I remember rightly: 'We find that the deceased met death while inadvisably attempting to stop a revolver bullet in motion' or words to that effect. I thought at the time it was a masterpiece of legal fiction."

"I should say it was," commented Dick. "The quibbles and technicalities that make our laws a good deal of a joke to-day have nothing much on that."

"That's a fact," agreed Mr. Melton; "some of the results of our modern 'justice,' so called, are certainly laughable. It's all very well to give a man every chance and the benefit of every doubt, but when a conviction is set aside because the court clerk was an hour behind time getting to court on the day of the trial, it begins to look as though things were being carried too far. Mere technicalities and lawyers' quibbles should not have the weight with judges that for some reason they seem to possess."

"I've no doubt," remarked Bert, "that some of the rough and ready courts such as you were just telling us about meted out a pretty fair brand of justice at that."

"Yes, they did," replied Mr. Melton. "They got right down to the core of the argument, and cut out all confusing side issues. If, for instance, three witnesses all swore they saw a man steal a horse, and yet were unable to agree on the exact time of the stealing, the chances were ten to one that the horse thief would be strung up without further loss of time. And there was no appeal from the findings of a frontier jury."

"It must have been an exciting life, that of the old frontier days," commented Bert. "I guess nobody had to complain much of the monotony of it."

"Not so you could notice," replied Mr. Melton with a smile, "but there wasn't half as much shooting going on all the time as you might believe from reading the current stories in the magazines dealing with the 'wild and woolly West.' Most everybody carried a gun, of course, but they weren't used so very often. Every man knew that his neighbor was probably an expert in the use of his 'shooting irons,' too, so there wasn't much percentage in starting an argument. Most of the scraps that did occur would never have been started, if it hadn't been for the influence of 'red-eye,' as the boys used to call the vile brands of whiskey served out in the frontier saloons. That whiskey bit like vitriol, and a few glasses of it were enough to make any man take to the war path."