"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."