Bradlee frowned slightly. “You’ve heard my nickname, I see,” he said. “You didn’t place me before?”
“Place you—well, I just didn’t, sir,” Jack smiled broadly. “You know, I thought you were so darned extravagant about that Leonard rod.” And Bradlee smiled too, pleased with the comrade-like confidence. He laid a fatherly hand on Jack’s arm.
“State the situation now, Izaak Walton,” he commanded.
So Jack, stammering a bit at first, forgetting himself soon, and, launching out into a perfectly regardless wealth of law language which flowed quaintly from his young mouth, set forth his case. There was a small railroad, it appeared, running twelve miles, from Skaneateles to Skaneateles Junction, wholly within the State. At Skaneateles Junction the road joins the New York Central. A train was made up at Skaneateles, consisting of engine, tender, caboose, four local freight cars, and one freight car billed through to Chicago, via New York Central and Lake Shore. A brakeman on this train was injured between Skaneateles and Skaneateles Junction by the negligence of the railroad company, but also because of his own negligence.
“You see,” finished Jack, addressing the great railway magnates and the interstate commerce commissioner as man to man, “the question to be settled is whether that small road is engaged in interstate commerce, so that the brakeman may recover in an action against it in spite of his contributory negligence.”
“State the situation now, Izaak Walton,” he commanded.
Billion Bradlee, whose nod shook Wall Street; Judge Carroll, who, with his associates, decided every day vast questions of national commerce; and the two powerful railway men listened with careful attention. The four pair of keen eyes were fixed on the boy’s face. The boy went on. His whole personality was focussed now on his argument, and, though in the vague margin of consciousness there might have been a knowledge of the incongruity between such an audience and a case in a law-school moot court, yet the glow of his intense interest in his affair reduced such thoughts to a dim fringe. The boy went on, unembarrassed, throwing his free power into his statement.
“You see, sir—you see, Judge Carroll, the act of 1898 speaks of ‘common carriers by railroads, while engaged in commerce between any of the States,’ being liable to any employee for injuries while ‘employed by such carrier in such commerce.’ The fact of contributory negligence does not bar a recovery in such actions.”
Conway Fitzhugh, who handled railroads in three States, spoke consideringly. “It’s an interesting question. I believe it has never been decided,” he said, and the president of the I. S. I. & O. Z. D. followed him up quickly.