Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town | Page 9

of the hotel business at
all, you will understand that as beside the decisions of the License
Commissioners of Missinaba County, the opinions of the Lords of the
Privy Council are mere trifles.
The matter in question was very grave. The Mariposa Court had just
fined Mr. Smith for the second time for selling liquors after hours. The
Commissioners, therefore, were entitled to cancel the license.
Mr. Smith knew his fault and acknowledged it. He had broken the law.
How he had come to do so, it passed his imagination to recall. Crime
always seems impossible in retrospect. By what sheer madness of the
moment could he have shut up the bar on the night in question, and
shut Judge Pepperleigh, the district judge in Missinaba County, outside
of it? The more so inasmuch as the closing up of the bar under the rigid
license law of the province was a matter that the proprietor never
trusted to any hands but his own. Punctually every night at 11 o'clock
Mr. Smith strolled from the desk of the "rotunda" to the door of the bar.
If it seemed properly full of people and all was bright and cheerful,
then he closed it. If not, he kept it open a few minutes longer till he had
enough people inside to warrant closing. But never, never unless he
was assured that Pepperleigh, the judge of the court, and Macartney,
the prosecuting attorney, were both safely in the bar, or the bar parlour,
did the proprietor venture to close up. Yet on this fatal night
Pepperleigh and Macartney had been shut out--actually left on the
street without a drink, and compelled to hammer and beat at the street
door of the bar to gain admittance.
This was the kind of thing not to be tolerated. Either a hotel must be
run decently or quit. An information was laid next day and Mr. Smith
convicted in four minutes,--his lawyers practically refusing to plead.
The Mariposa court, when the presiding judge was cold sober, and it
had the force of public opinion behind it, was a terrible engine of

retributive justice.
So no wonder that Mr. Smith awaited with anxiety the message of his
legal adviser.
He looked alternately up the street and down it again, hauled out his
watch from the depths of his embroidered pocket, and examined the
hour hand and the minute hand and the second hand with frowning
scrutiny.
Then wearily, and as one mindful that a hotel man is ever the servant of
the public, he turned back into the hotel.
"Billy," he said to the desk clerk, "if a wire comes bring it into the bar
parlour."
The voice of Mr. Smith is of a deep guttural such as Plancon or
Edouard de Reske might have obtained had they had the advantages of
the hotel business. And with that, Mr. Smith, as was his custom in off
moments, joined his guests in the back room. His appearance, to the
untrained eye, was merely that of an extremely stout hotelkeeper
walking from the rotunda to the back bar. In reality, Mr. Smith was on
the eve of one of the most brilliant and daring strokes ever effected in
the history of licensed liquor. When I say that it was out of the agitation
of this situation that Smith's Ladies' and Gent's Cafe originated,
anybody who knows Mariposa will understand the magnitude of the
moment.
Mr. Smith, then, moved slowly from the doorway of the hotel through
the "rotunda," or more simply the front room with the desk and the
cigar case in it, and so to the bar and thence to the little room or back
bar behind it. In this room, as I have said, the brightest minds of
Mariposa might commonly be found in the quieter part of a summer
afternoon.
To-day there was a group of four who looked up as Mr. Smith entered,
somewhat sympathetically, and evidently aware of the perplexities of
the moment.
Henry Mullins and George Duff, the two bank managers, were both
present. Mullins is a rather short, rather round, smooth-shaven man of
less than forty, wearing one of those round banking suits of pepper and
salt, with a round banking hat of hard straw, and with the kind of gold
tie-pin and heavy watch-chain and seals necessary to inspire confidence
in matters of foreign exchange. Duff is just as round and just as short,

and equally smoothly shaven, while his seals and straw hat are
calculated to prove that the Commercial is just as sound a bank as the
Exchange. From the technical point of view of the banking business,
neither of them had any objection to being in Smith's Hotel or to taking
a drink as long as the other was present. This, of