Page:06-24-1920 -The Story of the Jones County Calf Case.pdf/12

 stopped the fight, and they came back. Then it was that Bob found out that he had not handled the Foreman calves at all, the light colored calves, and then it was that he refused to pay his twenty-four dollar note. And I have told you what became of that case. The innocent purchaser business worked and Bob was beaten, and, as I have said, it cost him about fourteen hundred dollars; and fourteen hundred dollars, gentlemen, in those days was an enormous amount of money.

The criminal cases, I have told you what became of those. They were tried in Cedar County, and Bob was acquitted.

During these proceedings everybody had got so "hot up" in that county that they carried guns for one another. The malicious prosecution case at one time, I remember, had one hundred and thirty witnesses. I have forgotten where we tried that case the first time. I tried to get Bob to quit. I told him that he had been acquitted in the criminal case, but he always insisted, as he said, "I want my character back!" And I always said, "You got it back when you were acquitted." And Bob said, "No. They claim that they had reasonable and probable cause for having me indicted, and," he says, "I will try it with them until I will convince everybody in this country that they had no cause whatever." And so we kept on in the malicious prosecution case.

We tried that malicious prosecution case, or at least other lawyers tried it for Bob, and he and I hustled the testimony as long as Bob was anything but a [sic] bankrupt. He became a bankrupt, I might say, very early in the game, and after he got to where he could not hire distinguished counsel, why, then, and then only, I helped Bob try it, and we went on trying it for about eighteen or twenty years after that. It went to the supreme court, as you see, gentlemen, four times. The case, as I have said, was entitled Robert Johnson vs. E. V. Miller, et al., and is, I think, one of the leading cases on the subject of malicious prosecution. These four cases are reported in 63 Iowa 529, 69 Iowa 562, 82 Iowa 693 and 93 Iowa 165.

Now, during the time that the last indictment was pending, and that was during the lifetime of Colonel Preston, it was the