University of Virginia Library

THE JUDGE'S “SPIRITED WOMAN.”

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 503EAF. Page 121. In-line image; opening image for the story "The Judge's Spirited Woman." The image centers around a courtroom, where a woman, dressed in black and wearing a veil, is pointing a gun at a man about to approach the witness box. In the background are three men staring in horror and the judge who is standing up from his seat with hands raised.]

I WAS sitting here,” said the judge, “in this old pulpit, holding court, and we
were trying a big, wicked-looking Spanish desperado for killing the husband
of a bright, pretty Mexican woman. It was a lazy summer day, and an awfully
long one, and the witnesses were tedious. None of us took any interest in the trial
except that nervous, uneasy devil of a Mexican woman—because you know how
they love and how they hate, and this one had loved her husband with all her
might, and now she had boiled it all down into hate, and stood here spitting it at that
Spaniard with her eyes; and I tell you she would stir me up, too, with a little of her
summer lightning, occasionally. Well, I had my coat off and my heels up, lolling
and sweating, and smoking one of those cabbage cigars the San Francisco people
used to think were good enough for us in those times; and the lawyers they all had
their coats off, and were smoking and whittling, and the witnesses the same, and so
was the prisoner. Well, the fact is, there warn't any interest in a murder trial then,
because the fellow was always brought in “not guilty,” the jury expecting him to do
as much for them some time; and, although the evidence was straight and square

against this Spaniard, we knew we could not convict him without seeming to be
rather high-handed and sort of reflecting on every gentleman in the community;
for there warn't any carriages and liveries then, and so the only `style' there was,
was to keep your private graveyard. But that woman seemed to have her heart set
on hanging that Spaniard; and you'd ought to have seen how she would glare on
him a minute, and then look up at me in her pleading way, and then turn and for
the next five minutes search the jury's faces, and by and by drop her face in her
hands for just a little while as if she was most ready to give up; but out she'd
come again directly, and be as live and anxious as ever. But when the jury
announced the verdict—Not Guilty, and I told the prisoner he was acquitted and
free to go, that woman rose up till she appeared to be as tall and grand as a seventy-four-gun-ship,
and says she—

“`Judge, do I understand you to say that this man is not guilty, that murdered
my husband without any cause before my own eyes and my little children's, and
that all has been done to him that ever justice and the law can do?”

“`The same,' says I.

“And then what do you reckon she did? Why, she turned on that smirking
Spanish fool like a wild cat, and out with a `navy' and shot him dead in open court!”

“That was spirited, I am willing to admit.”

“Wasn't it, though?” said the judge admiringly. “I wouldn't have missed it
for anything. I adjourned court right on the spot, and we put on our coats and
went out and took up a collection for her and her cubs, and sent them over the
mountains to their friends. Ah, she was a spirited wench!”