At the trial I was called as a character witness. The prosecuting attorney asked Wagner how many shots he fired. Wagner said, “One, to save my own life.” When he asked him to account for the other four shots, he said he was riding a hardmouth horse and he tried to run away at the first shot, and in pulling on his bridle reins with his left hand he forgot what his right hand was doing, and thought he must have kept pulling the trigger on his gun. It was an automatic and, of course, as long as he kept pulling the trigger it kept shooting, but he couldn’t explain how the gun kept pointing towards Pratt’s body. The corpse laid there in the snow for twenty-four hours before the sheriff and coroner arrived and there was a gun found by the body. Wagner claimed self-defense. I testified that Pratt had pulled a Winchester on me once and threatened to kill me—which I think helped some. Wagner was quite wealthy when this happened. He got free but he was flat broke when he got out. He had told me several times prior to this incident that he was deathly afraid of Pratt, which I believe makes a very dangerous man when he is afraid of another man. One thing about our neighborhood I never could understand was as long as the people were very poor they were peaceable and neighborly but when they got a little prosperous some of them were in court the year around. We had a justice of the peace nearby and he sure had plenty business. I listened to one case that seems very amusing to me now. The judge liked to play poker and when he wasn’t busy with court duties he was usually in a poker game. This case was between two ranchers over the cutting of a wire fence. The trial was held in a little store. Each one acted as his own attorney, also testified in his own behalf. While one of them was testifying, the other one was sitting on the store counter, swinging his legs and listening, and when the other fellow made a statement he didn’t approve of he said, “That’s a damn lie.” The judge jumped to his feet and said, “Damn you, you can’t talk that way in this court.” After the trial the judge took the case under advisement for a few hours. Late that night I met the judge and asked him how the trial came out and when he told me I expressed some surprise. He said, “Hell, that other fellow couldn’t win in this court with four aces!” Charlie used to come to the ranch quite often and enjoyed riding horseback, but I always had a hard time to convince him the horses were gentle. We kept about ten head and as I was the only one who rode them, they were always fat and rarin’ to go, and as when he and I worked together in the past, I was nearly always riding colts. He said he didn’t believe I ever owned a gentle horse.