'Yes; you are quite right—liable to go to jail for fifteen days. You'll go down with the policeman at once.' With that observation the conversation naturally closed, and the victim of so-called sunstroke 'went down.'
The bench does not always come off so victoriously. A prisoner before the court of Keatingville, Montana, neglecting to remove his hat, the sheriff was directed to do it for him, and obeyed instructions by knocking the offending head-gear off with his rifle. The owner picked it up, and as he clapped it on his head again shouted: 'I am bald, judge!' A repetition of the performance followed; at which, waxing indignant, his Honour rose and said: 'I fine you five dollars for contempt of court—to be committed until the fine is paid!'
The offender walked up to 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 justice must have felt as small as his brother-judge when he priced the cow. Being at Little Rock, Arkansas, on business, that judge strolled into the market, and seeing a farmer with a cow, stepped up to him and asked what he wanted for her. 'Thirty dollars,' said the farmer. 'She'll give you five quarts of milk if you feed her well.'
'Why,' quoth the judge, 'I have cows on my farm, not much more than half as big as yours, which give twenty quarts a day.'
The cow-owner eyed his new acquaintance very hard, as if trying to remember if he had seen him before, and then inquired where he lived. 'My home is in Iowa,' was the reply.
'Yes, stranger,' said the farmer, '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 may have been an officer in some of them regiments?'
Without satisfying his interlocutor's curiosity on that point, the judge, we are told, 'slid for the court-house.'