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wasn’t drunk I wouldn’t of done it and that I have gave up the Devil Rum for good and all. It is strong drink that has brought me to this sorry pass.”
    â€œThat’s a fine sentiment, but if you were truly repentant, you would tell this court what you did with the money you stole from the Wells Fargo box in your charge.”
    â€œI spent it, Your Excellency. I said that at the start.”
    Judge Blackthorne hooked on his spectacles and thumbed through the stack of sheets on the bench before him. “At six forty-five P.M. on Thursday, November twenty-fourth, 1881, you told Marshal Pendragon that the Overland stagecoach you were driving had been waylaid by three masked men ten miles east of Helena and that you were forced at gunpoint to surrender the strongbox containing eight hundred sixty-eight dollars and thirty-three cents. At half-past three the following morning, acting
upon information supplied by an unidentified party, Marshal Pendragon arrested you in a room at Chicago Joe’s Dance Hall and charged you with grand theft. A search of your person and rooms failed to discover more than eleven dollars and thirteen cents in cash. Do you intend this court to believe that in less than nine hours you managed to spend the sum of eight hundred fifty-seven dollars and twenty cents on women and whiskey?”
    â€œI bought a cigar at the Coliseum.”
    Blackthorne gaveled down the roar from the gallery. When the last cough had faded he folded his spectacles and rested his hands on the bench.
    â€œSloan McInerney, having been tried and found guilty of the crime of federal grand theft, it is the decision of this court that you will be removed from this room to the county jail, until such time as you can be transported to the territorial prison at Deer Lodge. There you will be confined and forced to work at hard labor for not less than fifteen, nor more than twenty-five years. If upon your release you take it upon yourself to recover the money you stole from wherever you have it hidden, you will be satisfied to know that you sacrificed half your life for a wage of slightly more than one dollar per week.” The gavel cracked.
    As the jailers were removing McInerney, I waved to catch the Judge’s eye. He crooked a finger at me and withdrew to his chambers.
    It was the room where he spent most of his time when he wasn’t actually hearing cases, and he had furnished it with as many of the creature comforts as an honest man could on a government salary. Walnut shelves contained his extensive and well-thumbed legal library as well as a complete set of Dickens and his guiltiest pleasures, the works of Mark Twain and Bret Harte, with space for his pipes and tobacco and cigars in their
sandalwood humidors. The black iron safe where he kept petty cash and the court officers’ payroll supported a portable lock rack in which his cognacs and unblended whiskeys continued to age patiently between his rare indulgences. The scant wall space left by his books and the window looking out on the gallows he had decorated with a small watercolor in a large mahogany frame of a French harbor and a moth-eaten, bullet-chewed flag on a wooden stretcher to remind him of his service in the Mexican War. He read for work and recreation in a well-upholstered leather swivel behind his polished oak desk while his visitors squirmed on the straight-backed wooden chair in front.
    â€œFifteen to twenty-five seems stiff,” I said, when he had traded his robes for his frock coat and we were seated across from each other. “You gave Jules Stoddard less than that when he stuck up the freight office for twenty-five hundred.”
    â€œStoddard didn’t work for the freight company. I haven’t a drop of mercy for traitors. Are you packed for Canada?” He never spent more than thirty seconds reviewing a judgment.
    â€œOskar Bundt said he’d have those new grips on my Deane-Adams by tomorrow. I’ll