advised the Colonel to see the woman himself.  Colonel Baker did go, Governor Foote accompanying him.  The Governor said he had never witnessed such a manifestation of a woman’s power and irresistible influence.  Belle Cora was inspired to the height of heroism, in her devotion to Cora, her purpose to secure his acquittal and prevent his sacrifice.  She first appealed, implored, begged Colonel Baker to stand by his engagement.  He making no response, and seeming not to yield, she commanded that he must, that he should.  She would double his fee.  She would have him appear as Cora’s counsel, if he did no more than sit in Court with Cora near him, and speak no word at all.  But go in Court and have it known that he was Cora’s counsel, he must.  She was inflexible in this.  And when the day of trial came Colonel Baker did appear, together with General James A. McDougall, Colonel James and Frank Tilford — as counsel for Charles Cora, and it was on that trial that he made the most eloquent and extraordinary argument and plea of his life in a criminal case.  It was not a packed jury in Cora’s case.  Care had been taken to empanel only good, respectable citizens, some of whom, a short time afterward, became members of the Vigilance Committee, and in great or less degree participated in the seizure of Cora from the county jail and in his condemnation and execution.  Three of the jury were prominent Front street merchants.  Notwithstanding all the feeling against Cora, the popular unrelenting prejudice, and the great preponderance of the foremost legal minds of the San Francisco Bar, to his prosecution, Alex.  Campbell, General Williams and Colonel Sam.  Inge, U. S. District Attorney, to assist the public prosecutor, the jury disagreed, and of the jurors who held out against a verdict of guilty of murder were three Front street merchants and others of equal high standing in the community.  Cora was held for another trial, and it was while awaiting this that he was seized by the Vigilance Committee, taken to their rooms and hanged.

The excitement consequent upon the killing of Richardson did not culminate in the formation of a Vigilance Committee, similar to that of 1851, but it influenced the public mind in that direction.  It was the piling of the combustibles which required only the next spark from the electric battery to fire the heap to consuming flames.  There were still in the city a round number of the early Vigilance Committee which had ridden San Francisco of the “Sydney thieves;” some who had also, in 1849, suppressed the “Hounds;” and they were prepared again to meet violence and lawlessness with the stronger arm of organized force and the quick, sharp vengeance of the lex talionis.