Never in all the world, perhaps, were a man’s feelings so outraged as were the General’s.  He said he had never heard of such high-handed conduct in all his life as this Morgan’s.  And he said there was no use in going to law—­Morgan had no shadow of right to remain where he was —­nobody in the wide world would uphold him in it, and no lawyer would take his case and no judge listen to it.  Hyde said that right there was where he was mistaken—­everybody in town sustained Morgan; Hal Brayton, a very smart lawyer, had taken his case; the courts being in vacation, it was to be tried before a referee, and ex-Governor Roop had already been appointed to that office and would open his court in a large public hall near the hotel at two that afternoon.

The General was amazed.  He said he had suspected before that the people of that Territory were fools, and now he knew it.  But he said rest easy, rest easy and collect the witnesses, for the victory was just as certain as if the conflict were already over.  Hyde wiped away his tears and left.

At two in the afternoon referee Roop’s Court opened and Roop appeared throned among his sheriffs, the witnesses, and spectators, and wearing upon his face a solemnity so awe-inspiring that some of his fellow-conspirators had misgivings that maybe he had not comprehended, after all, that this was merely a joke.  An unearthly stillness prevailed, for at the slightest noise the judge uttered sternly the command: 

“Order in the Court!”

And the sheriffs promptly echoed it.  Presently the General elbowed his way through the crowd of spectators, with his arms full of law-books, and on his ears fell an order from the judge which was the first respectful recognition of his high official dignity that had ever saluted them, and it trickled pleasantly through his whole system: 

“Way for the United States Attorney!”

The witnesses were called—­legislators, high government officers, ranchmen, miners, Indians, Chinamen, negroes.  Three fourths of them were called by the defendant Morgan, but no matter, their testimony invariably went in favor of the plaintiff Hyde.  Each new witness only added new testimony to the absurdity of a man’s claiming to own another man’s property because his farm had slid down on top of it.  Then the Morgan lawyers made their speeches, and seemed to make singularly weak ones —­they did really nothing to help the Morgan cause.  And now the General, with exultation in his face, got up and made an impassioned effort; he pounded the table, he banged the law-books, he shouted, and roared, and howled, he quoted from everything and everybody, poetry, sarcasm, statistics, history, pathos, bathos, blasphemy, and wound up with a grand war-whoop for free speech, freedom of the press, free schools, the Glorious Bird of America and the principles of eternal justice! [Applause.]