71 So. 798 | La. | 1916
Statement of the Case.
Plaintiff claimed $5,000, as damages alleged to have been sustained by reason of the failure of defendant to deliver his trunk, and he obtained a judgment for $100, from which defendant’s executor has appealed.
Defendant kept a hotel, and plaintiff stopped there for four days, in room 228, and left without taking his trunk. He says that he notified some one in the office that he would send for it, but the clerks deny that he did so, and he made no attempt to identify the person to whom he gave the notice. In the course of the same day, he sent a grocery-man, with a wagon, for the trunk, and the man found a negro porter, to whom he gave a slip of paper that he had received from plaintiff, the contents of which were unknown to him, as he was unable to read, and he says that the porter went into thé hotel, and, returning, told him to get the name of the person whose trunk he was seeking and the number of his room, whereupon he went
“Q. He asked, ‘Why didn’t you give up my trunk?’ I said, ‘I had no order.’ He said, ‘You told my driver I had not paid my bill.’ I said, ‘No; 'nobody has ever asked yet for your trunk at all; I told the driver that called for a trunk out of 228 that the party who then occupied the room had not paid his bill, and I wouldn’t give up the trunk.’ He said, ‘That’s all right; give me a duplicate bill, marked paid.’ Q. And you gave him an order on the head porter? A. Told the porter to deliver the trunk.”
Opinion.
The relation of innkeeper and guest which had subsisted between plaintiff and defendant terminated when plaintiff paid his bill and left the inn, and, whether plaintiff notified defendant that he intended to leave his trunk or failed to give such notice, there was no agreement or expectation that he should pay for its storage; hence defendant became, at most, the gratuitous bailee of the trunk, and, as such, liable for a loss respecting it only if occasioned by his fraud or gross negligence. There is no suggestion of fraud in the matter, and the evidence fails to prove gross negligence, since it fails to show that any signed order for the trunk was ever presented on behalf of plaintiff, or that defendant, or his agents, were ever made to understand that it was plaintiff who was demanding it, until he himself called for it, when it was immediately delivered to him.
It is therefore ordered that the. judgment appealed from be set aside1, and that plaintiff’s demand be rejected, and this suit dismissed at his cost in both courts.