Leaving the courthouse Mr. Tutt encountered Bonnie Doon.

“Young man,” he remarked severely, “you assured me that fellow was only a harmless tramp!”

“Well,” answered Bonnie, “that’s what he said.”

“He says now he’s a burglar,” retorted Mr. Tutt wrathfully.  “I don’t believe he knows what he is.  Did you ever hear of such an outrageous verdict?  With not a scrap of evidence to support it?”

Bonnie lit a cigarette doubtfully.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he muttered.  “The jury seems to have sized him up rather better than we did.”

“Jury!” growled Mr. Tutt, rolling his eyes heavenward. “’Sweet land of liberty!’”

Lallapaloosa Limited

“Ethics:  The doctrine of man’s duty in respect to
himself and the rights of others.” 
—­CENTURY DICTIONARY.

“I don’t say that all these people couldn’t be squared;
but it is right to tell you that I shouldn’t be sufficiently
degraded in my own estimation unless I was insulted
with a very considerable bribe.” 

          
                                            —­POOH-BAH.

“I’ve been all over those securities,” Miss Wiggin informed Mr. Tutt as he entered the office one morning, “and not a single one of them is listed on the Stock Exchange.”

“What securities are those?” asked her employer, hanging his tall hat on the antiquated mahogany coat tree in the corner opposite the screen that ambushed the washing apparatus.  “I don’t remember any securities,” he remarked as he applied a match to the off end of a particularly green and vicious-looking stogy.

“Why, of course you do, Mr. Tutt!” insisted Miss Wiggin.  “Don’t you remember those great piles of bonds and stocks that Doctor Barrows left here with you to keep for him?”

“Oh, those!” Mr. Tutt smiled inscrutably.  “Mr. Barrows is not a physician,” he corrected her, running his eye over the General Sessions calendar.  “He’s only a ’doc’—­that is to say, one who doctors.  You know you can doctor a lot of things besides the human anatomy.  No, I guess they’re not listed on the Stock Exchange or anywhere else.”

“Well, here’s a schedule I made of them—­Miss Sondheim typed it—­and their total face value is seventeen million eight hundred thousand dollars.  I tried to find out all I could, but none of the firms on Wall Street had ever heard of any of them—­excepting of one that was traded in on the curb up to within a few weeks.  There’s Great Lakes and Canadian Southern Railway Company,” she went on, “Chicago Water Front and Terminal Company, Great Geyser Texan Petroleum and Llano Estacado Land Company—­dozens and dozens of them, and not one has an office or, so far as I can find out, any tangible existence—­but the one I spoke of.”

“Which is this great exception?” queried Mr. Tutt absently as he searched through the Law Journal for the case he was going to try that afternoon.  “You said one of them had been dealt in on the curb?  You astonish me!”