FEEMY. It’s easy to be respectable with nobody ever offering you a chance to be anything else.
THE WOMEN [clamoring all together] Shut up, you hussy. Youre a disgrace. How dare you open your lips to answer your betters? Hold your tongue and learn your place, miss. You painted slut! Whip her out of the town!
THE SHERIFF. Silence. Do you hear? Silence. [The clamor ceases]. Did anyone else see the prisoner with the horse?
FEEMY [passionately] Aint I good enough?
BABSY. No. Youre dirt: thats what you are.
FEEMY. And you—
THE SHERIFF. Silence. This trial is a man’s job; and if the women forget their sex they can go out or be put out. Strapper and Miss Evans: you cant have it two ways. You can run straight, or you can run gay, so to speak; but you cant run both ways together. There is also a strong feeling among the men of this town that a line should be drawn between those that are straight wives and mothers and those that are, in the words of the Book of Books, taking the primrose path. We don’t wish to be hard on any woman; and most of us have a personal regard for Miss Evans for the sake of old times; but theres no getting out of the fact that she has private reasons for wishing to oblige Strapper, and that—if she will excuse my saying so—she is not what I might call morally particular as to what she does to oblige him. Therefore I ask the prisoner not to drive us to give Miss Evans the oath. I ask him to tell us fair and square, as a man who has but a few minutes between him and eternity, what he done with my horse.
THE BOYS. Hear, hear! Thats right. Thats fair. That does it. Now Blanco. Own up.
BLANCO. Sheriff: you touch me home. This is a rotten world; but there is still one thing in it that remains sacred even to the rottenest of us, and that is a horse.
THE BOYS. Good. Well said, Blanco. Thats straight.