Lillian Hudson. Governor Thurmond’s Bird-House (1915) 32 pp.
A novelette of tax evasion. The wealthy Governor Thurmond—a former governor of California—now lives in retirement in an unnamed town that “sits proudly on the uplands of the peninsula that extends like a sheltering arm around the western rim of the most beautiful bay in the world, and which terminates in San Francisco, sitting in sovereignty over the Western Seas.” In order to circumvent a national income tax just passed by Congress, Thurmond extracts all of his money from the bank and hires a young boy named Othol to build him a bird-house in which to hide it at the top of a tall tree. When Othol accidentally drops the bird-house and discovers its contents, he turns it over to Thurmond’s lawyer, who discovers not only that he is a tax evader, but that he has illegally appropriated his long dead sister’s inheritance. At the resulting trial, the judge and Othol set the governor’s penalty: a free ticket to the Pan-Pacific International Exposition for every child in California.
Setting: San Francisco Peninsula
Baird & Greenwood 1255