Raising $5000 Bail Money

Originally Aired: September 18, 1935

Lum & Abner #198, "Raising $5000 Bail Money,"

Lum finds himself locked in the Pine Ridge jail after being arrested by Mr. Donahue, a Department of Justice representative, for violating the Blue Sky Law by selling fraudulent stock in the Great Western Sterling Silver Company. Abner has been trying to raise the $5000 bond needed to secure Lum's release, but the townsfolk aren't moving quickly enough for Lum's liking. When Lum tries to motivate Abner by invoking the old saying that "tomorrow never comes," he inadvertently creates total confusion.

What starts as simple advice quickly spirals into an absurd philosophical debate about the nature of time. Abner becomes genuinely convinced that Lum is claiming tomorrow will literally never arrive, leading him to panic about all the repenting he needs to do, including coming clean about trading a blind horse to Eli Wilkins. As the conversation grows more tangled, Abner begins to suspect that Lum has suffered a head injury and starts testing his mental faculties, much to Lum's bewilderment. When Dick Huddleston arrives to potentially sign the bond, Abner's concern for Lum's supposed confusion threatens to derail the whole arrangement.