The Colonel's enemies have tried, on various occasions, to "get" him, but without distinguished success. The Colonel goes into a fight with joy. Once, when he was on the stand as a witness in a libel suit which had been brought against his paper, a copy of the editorial containing the alleged libel was handed to him by the attorney for the prosecution.
"Colonel Nelson," said the attorney, menacingly, "did you write this?"
"No, sir!" bristled the Colonel with apparent regret at the forced negation of his answer, "but I subscribe to every word of it!"
Once the Colonel's enemies almost succeeded in putting him in jail.
A "Star" reporter wrote a story illustrating the practice of the Jackson County Circuit Court in refusing to permit a divorce case to be dismissed by either husband or wife until the lawyers in the case had received their fees. The "Star" contended that such practice, where the couple had made up their quarrel, made the court, in effect, a collection agency. Through a technical error the story, as printed, seemed to refer to the judge of one division of the court when it should have applied to another. The judge who was, through this error, apparently referred to, seized the opportunity to issue a summons charging Colonel Nelson with contempt of court.
Colonel Nelson, who had known nothing of the story until he read it in print, not only went to the front for his reporter, but caused the story to be reprinted, with the added statement that it was true and that he had been summonsed on account of it.
When he appeared in court the judge demanded an apology. This the Colonel refused to give, but offered to prove the story true. The judge replied that the truth of the story had nothing to do with the case. He permitted no evidence upon that subject to be introduced, but, drawing from his pocket some typewritten sheets, proceeded to read from them a sentence, condemning the Colonel to one day in jail. This sentence he then ordered the sheriff to execute.
However, before the sheriff could do so, a lawyer, representing the Colonel, ran upstairs and secured from the Court of Appeals, in the same building, a writ of habeas corpus on the ground that the decision of the lower judge had been prepared before he heard the evidence. This the latter admitted. Thus the Colonel was saved from jail—somewhat, it is rumored, to his regret. Later the case was dismissed by the Supreme Court of Missouri.