The Drunk, The Lecturer, and The Law in Walla Walla

Old Trabue stood by his office, his battered silk hat pushed back on his head. He talked of a man named Pole, a known local who had spent two days blind, stark drunk, creating a spectacle from one end of town to the other. Pole had been heckling a traveling lecturer near the Winston House who was giving a speech on health and diet using gaudy pictures. When the lecturer began to lecture on the evils of drink, Pole—the town's most notorious drinker—began to ring a cowbell, mocking the speaker until the crowd turned against the visitor. When the law finally arrested Pole, the trial before Judge Bill Barrett was a mockery; Pole, still half-drunk, treated the court as a joke, arguing his case with such wit that the crowd roared. Barrett eventually fined him thirty dollars or ten days of breaking rock on the street, to which Pole famously replied that he wouldn't break rock in the broiling sun just because he beat a skunk at his own game.