"Gentlemen, I came here this morning not to make a muss, but to prevent that roaring lion there--who is always going about the world seeking whom he may devour--from gobbling up that innocent lamb of a young girl; and I mean to stay here until I _do_ prevent it. Yes! I'm talking about _you_, you beast!" she exclaimed, suddenly turning upon Anglesea. "And you better not show your ugly mug down in Wild Cats' Gulch, if you don't want to be stood on your head and druv down into the ground like a post, and buried alive! The boys are piping hot after you, they are, I tell you! It was them that put up a pile to send me on here after you!" The woman was handsome, but short and stout, and, like _Hamlet_, "scant o' breath." She had talked herself out of wind for the moment. Anglesea seized the opportunity, controlled his temper by an effort, turned to the gentlemen near him, and said: "Friends, if that woman can be kept quiet for five minutes, I will answer, to the satisfaction of all here present--though I consider it an outrage that I should be compelled to answer one who ought rather to be arrested and sent off to prison for a most flagrant breach of the peace! Still, if she can keep quiet, I will do so." "All right, old rooster!" laughed the woman. "It is your play now, and I give you your turn! Down with your best card!" "Neighbors," continued Col. Anglesea, fully controlling himself, and falling into that confidential tone which he had always found so effectual--"neighbors, I call upon you, in common justice to me, to use your reason and judgment in this matter. You see this woman who has brought forward this most absurd, preposterous, and, I must say, humiliating claim to be my wife. For it is most humiliating, indeed, that any of you should have the faintest shadow of a suspicion that she may be telling the truth. Why, gentlemen, I am from England. She says she is from California. I never was in California in all the days of my life. I never set eyes on this woman before this hour. She is no more my wife than she is the empress of India. I call upon you to look at her, and ask yourselves if it is at all likely or possible that she could, under any circumstances, be--what she claims to be. You see her appearance; you see her conduct; you hear her speech; is it likely--is it possible--that I could have married such a person? You see the absurdity of the thing. No, gentlemen; this person is a lunatic, laboring under some fantastic hallucination, or she is an impostor, conspiring, with others, to blackmail me. I demand, in the name of justice, that she be arrested and sent to prison for her flagrant breach of the peace in her outrageous assault upon me this morning."