Woolridge v. Boardman

Britt, C. A. F.Boardman and William Watts, individually, and as partners composing the firm of A. F. Boardman & Co., filed their petition in insolvency on the twenty-eighth day of March, 1895, and were thereupon duly adjudicated insolvent debtors; subsequently plaintiff was elected their assignee. As such assignee he obtained judgment in this action requiring the defendant, Mary Boardman, wife of said A. F. Boardman, to reconvey to him, the plaintiff, nine hundred and ninety shares of stock in a certain mining corporation, of the value of two thousand nine hundred and seventy dollars, which Boardman had transferred to her as a gift on September 22, 1894; this on the ground that such transfer was fraudulent and void as to the creditors of the husband. A motion of defendants Board-man and wife for new trial was denied, hence the appeal.

[76]The chief contention of appellants is that the evidence did not sustain the finding of the court that Boardman gave his wife the stock intending thereby to hinder, delay, and defraud his creditors. It would be unprofitable labor to abstract at length the evidence in the record touching the pecuniary condition of Board-man at the time of the transfer assailed by the plaintiff. Boardman gave testimony to the effect that in September, 1894, the assets of his firm were worth thirty thousand dollars, while the indebtedness was less than half of this amount, and counsel insist that the evidence in this particular was without substantial conflict. But we find discrepancies concerning the items making up said total which tended to cast discredit on his estimates. Thus, he valued certain stock in trade then on hand at six thousand dollars, when other testimony in the case placed it at two thousand four hundred dollars; he testified that certain lands were worth, at that time, twro thousand nine hundred dollars, but, in his petition in insolvency, rated them, at no more than eleven hundred dollars; substantially the same credits in favor of the firm, which, according to his testimony at the trial, were worth in September, 1894, their nominal amount —over ten thousand dollars—he stated in said petition to be uncollectible beyond one-half their face. Confessedly, a little more than six months after the gift in question, both Boardman and his partner were insolvent, and, in our opinion, the matters to which we have alluded, and other evidence in the case of similar tendency, warranted the conclusion that Boardman’s circumstances were not materially worse when he commenced proceedings in insolvency than when he gave to his wife the mining stock; indeed, the business of the partnership seems to have resulted in a small profit during the intervening period. We concede the point of appellants that the insolvency of the concern in March is of itself no foundation for an inference that it was insolvent in the preceding September (Windhaus v. Bootz, 92 Cal. 617); but the. subsequent insolvency, occurring