The foreman.  Dont you go putting her up to what to say.  She said she took it.

The woman.  Yes:  I took it from a man that met me.  I thought God sent him to me.  I rode here joyfully thinking so all the time to myself.  Then I noticed that the child was like lead in my arms.  God would never have been so cruel as to send me the horse to disappoint me like that.

Blanco.  Just what He would do.

Strapper.  We aint got nothin to do with that.  This is the man, aint he? [pointing to Blanco].

The woman [pulling herself together after looking scaredly at Blanco, and then at the Sheriff and at the jury] No.

The foreman.  You lie.

The Sheriff.  Youve got to tell us the truth.  Thats the law, you know.

The woman.  The man looked a bad man.  He cursed me; and he cursed the child:  God forgive him!  But something came over him.  I was desperate, I put the child in his arms; and it got its little fingers down his neck and called him Daddy and tried to kiss him; for it was not right in its head with the fever.  He said it was a little Judas kid, and that it was betraying him with a kiss, and that he’d swing for it.  And then he gave me the horse, and went away crying and laughing and singing dreadful dirty wicked words to hymn tunes like as if he had seven devils in him.

Strapper.  She’s lying.  Give her the oath, George.

The Sheriff.  Go easy there.  Youre a smart boy, Strapper; but youre not Sheriff yet.  This is my job.  You just wait.  I submit that we’re in a difficulty here.  If Blanco was the man, the lady cant, as a white woman, give him away.  She oughtnt to be put in the position of having either to give him away or commit perjury.  On the other hand, we don’t want a horse-thief to get off through a lady’s delicacy.

The foreman.  No we don’t; and we don’t intend he shall.  Not while I am foreman of this jury.

Blanco [with intense expression] A rotten foreman!  Oh, what a rotten foreman!

The Sheriff.  Shut up, will you.  Providence shows us a way out here.  Two women saw Blanco with a horse.  One has a delicacy about saying so.  The other will excuse me saying that delicacy is not her strongest holt.  She can give the necessary witness.  Feemy Evans:  you’ve taken the oath.  You saw the man that took the horse.

Feemy.  I did.  And he was a low-down rotten drunken lying hound that would go further to hurt a woman any day than to help her.  And if he ever did a good action it was because he was too drunk to know what he was doing.  So it’s no harm to hang him.  She said he cursed her and went away blaspheming and singing things that were not fit for the child to hear.

Blanco [troubled] I didn’t mean them for the child to hear, you venomous devil.