old lion on the street, then a humped over old man. "Well," he said, "Boy,"—he used to call me boy; I was a boy when he and I began sleeping together. He says, "Well, Boy, the last one of them is dead." I said, "Yes, I heard so. Where do you think he has gone, Bob?" "Well," he says, "I will tell you; I have changed my mind about that." I said, "How is that?" "Well," he says, "I don't think any of them is in hell." "Well," I said, "I am glad of that, Bob. What has changed your mind?" "Well," he says, "There wasn't no necessity for sending them to hell. Look what I done to them!"
And so Bob "got his character back". At the last trial up in Waterloo, the Honorable Horace Boies was just closing, and I was just about to begin. Old Horace had made an argument that made me cold. He just chilled me with the force of his argument the whole length of my spine. Bob sat right next to me. He saw that Horace was going to sit down, and he leaned over to me, and he said, "Charley, tell them I don't care whether they give me a cent or a million dollars. What I want is my character back!"
And so, after his debts were all paid, and he had served in that town twice as mayor, and so far as I know every one respected the old lion, the lion of the Calf Case, he walked down home one day and sat down in the kitchen with his old wife, Mary Ann, who had attended every trial and sat by that old man through thick and thin, he sat down in the kitchen with her, and she happened to be looking at him, and he dropped his head, the first time he ever dropped his head in his life when he was in battle, and she went to him—he was dead.
Old Bob, the lion of the Jones County Calf Case, peace to his ashes!
The Toastmaster: You have just listened, my friends to the richest story in the legal history of Iowa. Throughout that story runs a richer story, the story of the sweetest character at the Iowa bar, Charles E. Wheeler. Charley, I know the bar of Iowa thank you for your splendid effort making it possible to place in printed form that story that our successors may read it.
