“Let her be sworn,” said the judge; and the woman who had been engaged for extra help in Mrs. Lambert’s laundry laid her hand on the Bible and kissed it reverently.
“Now,” said the magistrate, “what is it you wish me to hear?”
The woman answered promptly and under considerable excitement.
“It was my husband and that copper-headed scamp that robbed Mr. Smith’s store. They two planned it weeks and weeks ago; but it was not till Smith took a new boy on, that they could make anything of a haul. They did it together. My own husband, who is a footman in Fifth Avenue, only he goes by another name, expects that will carry him through bigamy and burglary, and everything else bad that begins with a B. In short, sir, only this morning, going out to my day’s work, as innocent as a lamb, thinking my husband was at his place down town, where females couldn’t come, though I never saw a smithereen of his money—not I. Well, yer honor, I went to me day’s work in a new place, being on account of another woman’s not being well, and there I finds my own husband making up to a creature that yer honor wouldn’t wipe your shoes on, saving yer presence, and she calling him Mr. Mahone, and talking about a wedding dress that stands alone with richness, and a Miss Spicer, who wants eternal and everlasting disgrace to fall on a family by the name of Laurence.
“Well, yer honor, the long and the short of it is this entirely. Jared Boyce and his brother, me own lawfully wedded husband, robbed Mr. Smith’s store, both of groceries and money, which they divided atween them, in my own room, and the groceries they packed away under my bed and in the closet, and me saying nothing, till they come one night and carried them away; so I, being put about by this, followed after them, and, with my own eyes, saw Jared and me husband hide the groceries and other things away in a wood-house back of a little place where I afterwards saw yon woman going in and out as if she belonged there.
“Well, yer honor, I said nothing about that, but minded me work, and keeping the baby nice in hopes it might ’tice me husband home more, wondering what it all meant, when I found out behind that close-horse in the laundry what was going on in them underground rooms, where servants set up for ladies; I just wiped the soap suds from my arms, put on my bit of a hood and foregathered awhile with a policeman that stands on our corner, about the best way of telling the truth and keeping me husband from that prowling lion with the cap, and it please your honor, he told me to come down here, and never fear that your honor wouldn’t give Robert a taste of Blackwell’s Island which I hope you will, just enough to set him straight and keep him out of the way of females in caps till he turns to his own lawfully married wife and child. That is all I ask your honor, and if you don’t believe me, just send some one up to me little place and I’ll show him a chist of tea and a box of crackers that they left with me, besides other things just to pacify me for taking off the rest, which I didn’t like at all, not always having tea and such things in the house.”
Here Mrs. Boyce was interrupted by the Judge, who pointed towards the door, and in a stern voice ordered the officer to stop that man.
The man was Jared Boyce, who had been making sickly efforts to slink out of sight, while his sister-in-law was giving her evidence. He had crept up to the door through which he was about to make a desperate plunge just as the Judge observed him. Terrified and shaking from head to foot, the poor wretch muttered that he wasn’t meaning to go out, and retreated to the nearest bench, where his limbs shrunk together, and his face grew more and more livid, as the woman rambled on with her evidence.
“Your honor,” said she, “I don’t want yez to be hard on my Robert. A week at Blackwell’s Island will be plenty to bring him to his sinses and make an honest man and dutiful husband of him. But as for the woman who was tempting him into unlawful bigermy, as the perliceman calls it; twenty years wouldn’t be too much for her, with plinty of hard work at the wash-tub, and bread and water to live on.”
Here Mrs. Boyce was preparing to step down from the witness stand but turned back again, having thought of something else.