Things went along swimmingly for some time. So successful had I been that I was feeling my oats all over, and expected to go right along through the winter, when I ran foul of a legal proposition, and learned the lesson that it takes money to buy justice; and though the law may be on your side it sometimes requires an awfully long time to reach it. Every man who has traveled on the road has probably had more or less trouble about license; and the time arrived when I was to get my experience. I was arrested while soliciting in the portrait business, and was fined fifty dollars in a city court. I was always rather a good fighter, anyway. I had what I thought at that time plenty of money, and my business life seemed to be at stake. Instead of paying that fine and letting the matter drop I took an appeal and vowed to follow the matter up. When, finally, the state supreme court affirmed the decision of the city court, and I still refused to pay, I found myself tight in jail, with a suspicion that I had to knuckle or remain there indefinitely. I still had money to talk, and, as the frames were made in one state, I was traveling in a second, and was a resident of a third, there was little trouble in getting the case before the supreme court of the United States, though it did seem to me it took a terrible long time for that court to come to a decision on a very simple case. When their opinion did come, however, it was in my favor, and reversed all the lower courts. The justices held, in effect, that a man could not be taxed for simply making a living; that the license demanded from me had been an attempted piece of extortion, which was an usurpation of power for the officers to have sought to collect, when it was their duty to see that law and justice were secured to all. It was further held that no state nor city could levy a tax on interstate commerce, in any form or guise, or on receipts derived from that transportation, or on the occupation or business of carrying it on. Of course, this was a great victory for me—when it came—but it did not prevent me having some very uncomfortable months and a course of treatment which might have meant ruin to some.