Page:Sketches by Mark Twain.djvu/165

Rh 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