A MURDER TRIAL IN NEVADA.

Evening Star, Volume VIII, Issue 2294, 13 September 1870, Page 2

A MURDER TRIAL IN NEVADA.

(From the Galaxy.) “I was sitting here,” said the judge, “in this old pulpit, holding court, and wc were trying a big, wicked-looking Spanish desperado, for killing the husband 1 of a bright, pretty Mexican woman. It was a, lazy summer day, and an awfully long one, andtho witnesses were tedious. None of us took any interest in the trial except that uneasy devil of a woman—because you know how they love and how they hate, and this one had loved her husband with all her might, and now she had boiled it down into hate, and stood here spitting at that Spaniard with her eyes; and I tell you she would stir me up, too, with a little of her summer lightning accasionally. Well, I had my coat off and my h'-els up, lolling and sweating, and smoking one of these cabbage cigars the San Fraticisco people used to think were good enough for us in those times; and the lawyers they all had their coats off, and were smoking and wittling, and the witnesses the same, and so was the prsoner. Well, the fact is, there wan’t any interest in a murder trial then,’ because the fellow Was always brought in not guilty, the jury expecting him to do as much for them some time; and although the evidence was straight and square against the Spaniard, we knew we could not convict him'without seeming to he 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 wns, to keep your private graveyard. But that woman ■seemed to have her heart, set on hanging that Spaniard; and ypu 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 bands for just a little while as if she was' most ready to give up, but out she’d come again directly and be as lively and anxious as even 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 as grand as a seventy-four gun ship, aiid says she: “ ‘ Judge, do I understand yon to say that this man is not guilty, that murdered my husband without a 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 the open court!” “ That wns spirited, lam willing to admit.” “Wasn’t it, though!” said the Judge, admiringly, “ I wouldn’t have missed it for anythin?. I adjourned court right on the spot, and we put on our coats and went out and took up a collection for her and her cubs, and sent them over the mountains to their friends. Ah, she was a spirited wench !"