Meanwhile, I had been standing by our jury bill. It went up and it went down on the calendar, and at last when it arrived at a hearing it was referred back to the Judiciary Committee with two other anti-corporation bills. The session was drawing toward the day provided by the constitution for its closing, and we could no longer doubt that we were being juggled out of our last chance by the Clerk and the Speaker—who was Mr. William G. Smith, since known as "Tramway Bill." [5]
"All right," Gardener said. "Not one of Speaker Smith's House bills will get through the Senate until he lets our jury bill get to a vote." He told Speaker Smith what he intended to do and next day he began to do it.
That afternoon, tired out, I was resting, during a recess of the House, in a chair that stood in a shadowed corner, when the Speaker hurried by heavily, evidently unaware of me, and rang a telephone. I heard him mention the name of "Mr. Evans," in a low, husky voice. I heard, sleepily, not consciously listening; and I did note at first connect "Mr. Evans" with William G. Evans of the tramway company. But a little later I heard the Speaker say: "Well, unless Gardener can be pulled off, we'll have to let that 'three-fourths' bill out. He's raising hell with a lot of our measures over in the Senate… What?… Yes.… Well, get at it pretty quick."
Those hoarse, significant words wakened like the thrill of an electric shock—wakened to an understanding of the strength of "special interests" that were opposed to us—and wakened in me, too, the anger of a determination to fight to a finish. The Powers that had "fixed" our juries, were now fixing Legislature. They had laughed at us in the courts; they were going to laugh at us in the Capitol!
Speaker Smith came lumbering out. He was a heavily built man, with a big jaw. And when he saw me there, confronting him, his face changed from a look of displeased surprise to one of angry contempt—lowering his head like a bull—as if he were saying to himself: "What! That d—— little devil! I'll bet he heard me!" But he did not speak. And neither did I. He went off about whatever business he had in hand, and I caught up my hat and hastened to Gardener to tell him what I had heard.
When the House met again, in committee of the whole, the Speaker, of course, was not in the Chair, and Gardener found him in the lobby. Gardener had agreed with me to say nothing of the telephone conversation but he threatened Smith that unless our jury bill was "reported out" by the Judiciary Committee and allowed to come to a vote, he would oppose every House bill in the Senate and talk the session to death. Smith fumed and blustered, but Gardener, with the blood in his face, out-blustered and out-fumed him. The Speaker, later in the day, vented some of his spleen by publicly threatening to eject me from the floor of the House as a lobbyist. But he had to allow the bill to come up, and it was finally passed, with very little opposition—for reasons which I was afterward to understand.
It had yet to be signed by the Speaker; and it had to be signed before the close of the session or it could not become a law. I heard rumours that some anti-corporation bills were going to be "lost" by the Chief Clerk, so that they might not be signed; and I kept my eye on him. He was a fat-faced, stupid-looking, flabby creature—by name D. H. Dickason—who did not appear capable of doing anything very daring. I saw the chairman of the Enrolling Committee place our bill on Dickason's desk, among those waiting for the Speaker's signature; and—while the House was busy—I withdrew it from the pile and placed it to one side, conspicuously, so that I could see it from a distance.
When the time came for signing—sure enough! the Clerk was missing, and some bills were missing with him. The House was crowded—floor and galleries—and the whole place went into an uproar at once. Nobody seemed to know which bills were gone; every member who had an anti-corporation bill thought it was his that had been stolen; and they all together broke out into denunciations of the Speaker, the Clerk, and everybody else whom they thought concerned in the outrage. One man jumped up on his chair and tried to dominate the pandemonium, shouting and waving his hands. The galleries went wild with noisy excitement. Men threatened each other with violence on the floor of the House, cursing and shaking their fists. Others rushed here and there trying to find some trace of the Clerk. The Speaker, breathless from calling for order and pounding with his gavel, had to sit down and let them rage.
At last, from my place by the wall, on the outskirts of the hubbub, I saw the Clerk dragged down the aisle by the collar, bleeding, with a blackened eye, apparently half drunk and evidently frightened into an abject terror. He had stolen a bill introduced by Senator Bucklin, providing that cities could own their own water works and gas works; but the Senator's wife had been watching him; she had followed him to the basement and stopped him as he tried to escape to the street; and it was the Senator now who had him by the neck.
They thrust him back into his chair, got the confusion quieted, and with muttered threats of the penitentiary for him and everybody concerned in the affair, they got back to business again with the desperate haste of men working against time. And our jury bill was signed!