He winked a fat eye. "Jury'll hang. Every time. I'm here to tell you so. Better settle it." [3]

We refused to. What was the use of courts if we could not get justice for this crippled boy? What was the use of practising law if we could not get a verdict on evidence that would convince a blind man? Settle it? Never!

So they went to our client and persuaded the boy to give up.

"Big Steve," attorney for the tramway company! The gas company's officers in court! The business men insulting the judge in his Club! The defendant's brother at the head of one of the smelter companies! I began to "connect up" "the Cat."

Gardener and I held a council of war. If it was possible for these men to "hang" juries whenever they chose, there was need of a law to make something less than a unanimous decision by a jury sufficient to give a verdict in civil cases. Colorado needed a "three-fourths jury law." Gardener was a popular young man, a good "mixer," a member of several fraternal orders, a hail-fellow-well-met, and as interested as I was in politics. He had been in the insurance business before he took up law, and he had friends everywhere. Why should he not go into politics?—as he had often spoken of doing.

In the intervals of the Smith suit, we had had a case in which a mother, whose child had been killed by a street car, had been unable to recover damages from the tramway company, because the company claimed, under the law, that her child was worthless alive or dead; and there was need of a statute permitting such as she to recover damages for distress and anguish of mind. We had had another case in which a young factory worker had been injured by the bursting of an emery wheel; and the law held that the boy was guilty of "contributory negligence" because he had continued to work at the wheel after he had found a flaw in it—although he had had no choice except to work at it or leave the factory and find employment elsewhere. There was need of a law giving workmen better protection in such circumstances. Why should not Gardener enter the Legislature and introduce these bills?—which I was eager to draft. Why not, indeed! The state needed them; the people wanted them; the courts were crippled and justice was balked because of the lack of them. Here was an opportunity for worthy ambition to serve the community and help his fellow-man.

That night, with all the high hopes and generous ideals and merciful ignorance of youth, we decided—without knowing what we were about—to go into the jungle and attack the Beast!

THE CAT PURRS

Denver was then, as it is now, a beautiful city, built on a slope, between the prairies and mountains, always sunny, cool, and clear-skyed with the very sparkle of happiness in its air; and on the crown of its hill, facing the romantic prospect of the Rockies, the State Capitol raised its dome—as proud as the ambition of a liberty-loving people—the symbol of an aspiration and the expression of its power. That Capitol, I confess, was to me a sort of granite temple erected by the Commonwealth of Colorado to law, to justice, to the ideals of self-government that have made our republic the promised land of all the oppressed of Europe; and I could conceive of no nobler work than to serve those ideals in the assembly halls of that building, with those eternal mountains on the horizon and that sun of freedom overhead. Surely a man may confess so much, without shame, of his youth and his inexperience.… It is not merely the gold on the dome of the Capitol that has given it another look to me now.

It was the year 1897. I was about twenty-eight years old, and my partner, Gardener, was three years younger. He was more worldly-wise than I was, even then; for while I had been busy with briefs and court-work, he had been the "business head" of the firm, out among business friends and acquaintances—"mixing," as they say—and through his innumerable connections, here and there, with this man and that fraternity, bringing in the cases that kept us employed. He was a "Silver Republican"; I, a Democrat. But we both knew that if he was to get into politics it must be with the backing of the party "organization" and the endorsement of the party "boss."