"Sheriff, remove the prisoner's hat," said a judge in the Court of Keatingville, Montana, when he noticed that the culprit before him had neglected to do so. The sheriff obeyed instructions by knocking off the hat with his rifle. The prisoner picked it up, and clapping it on his head again, shouted, "I am bald, judge." Once more it was "removed" by the sheriff, while the indignant judge rose and said, "I fine you five dollars for contempt of Court—to be committed until the fine is paid." The offender approached the judge, and laying down half a dollar remarked, "Your sentence, judge, is most ungentlemanly; but the law is imperative and I will have to stand it; so here is half a dollar, and the four dollars and a half you owed me when we stopped playing poker this morning makes us square."
The card-playing administrator of law must have felt as small as his brother-judge who priced a cow at an Arkansas cattle-market. Seeing one that took his fancy he asked the farmer what he wanted for her. "Thirty dollars, and she'll give you five quarts of milk if you feed her well," said the farmer. "Why," quoth the judge, "I have cows not much more than half her size which give twenty quarts of milk a day." The farmer eyed the would-be purchaser of the cow very hard, as if trying to remember if he had met him before, and then inquired where he lived. "My home is in Iowa," replied the judge. "Yes, stranger, I don't dispute it. There were heaps of soldiers from Iowa down here during the war, and they were the worst liars in the whole Yankee army. Maybe you were an officer in one of them regiments." Then the judge returned to his Court duties.
Judge Kiah Rodgers already figures in a story, and here we give his address to a delinquent when he presided at a Court in Louisiana. "Prisoner, stand up! Mr. Kettles, this Court is under the painful necessity of passing sentence of the law upon you. This Court has no doubt, Mr. Kettles, but what you were brought into this scrape by the use of intoxicating liquors. The friends of this Court all know that if there is any vice this Court abhors it is intoxication. When this Court was a young man, Mr. Kettles, it was considerably inclined to drink, and the friends of this Court know that this Court has naterally a very high temper; and if this Court had not stopped short off, I have no doubt, sir, but what this Court, sir, would have been in the penitentiary or in its grave."
There was a strong sense of duty to humanity, as well as seeing justice carried out, in the Californian sheriff after an interview with a self-confessed murderer, who desired to be sent to New York to be tried, when he addressed the prisoner: "So your conscience ain't easy, and you want to be hanged?" said the sheriff. "Well, my friend, the county treasury ain't well fixed at present, and I don't want to take any risks, in case you're not the man, and are just fishing for a free ride. Besides, those New York Courts can't be trusted to hang a man. As you say, you deserve to be killed, and your conscience won't be easy till you are killed, and as it can't make any difference to you or to society how you are killed, I guess I'll do the job myself!" and his hand moved to his pocket; but before he could pull out the revolver and level it at the murderer, that conscience-stricken individual was down the road and out of killing distance.
Like the sailor who objected to his captain undertaking the double duty of flogging and preaching, prisoners do not appreciate the judge who delivers sentence upon them and at the same time admonishes them in a long speech. After being sentenced a Californian prisoner was thus reproached by a judge for his lack of ambition:
"Where is it, sir? Where is it? Did you ever hear of Cicero taking free lunches? Did you ever hear that Plato gamboled through the alleys of Athens? Did you ever hear Demosthenes accused of sleeping under a coal-shed? If you would be a Plato, there would be a fire in your eye; your hair would have an intellectual cut; you'd step into a clean shirt; and you'd hire a mowing-machine to pare those finger-nails. You have got to go up for four months!"
In conclusion we return to the jury-box of a New York Court for the story of a well-known character who frequently was called to act along with other good men and true. As soon as they had retired to deliberate on the evidence they had heard, he would button up his coat and "turn in" on a bench, exclaiming, "Gentlemen, I'm for bringing in a verdict for the plaintiff (or the defendant, as he had settled in his mind), and all Creation can't move me. Therefore as soon as you have all agreed with me, wake me up and we'll go in."