ok for him in
the city prison at Sacramento--a town which he was not known ever to
have visited. As John K. Smith he was arraigned and, waiving
examination, committed for trial.

About two weeks before the trial, Mrs. Hardshaw, accidentally learning
that her husband was held in Sacramento under an assumed name on a
charge of burglary, hastened to that city without daring to mention the
matter to any one and presented herself at the prison, asking for an
interview with her husband, John K. Smith. Haggard and ill with anxiety,
wearing a plain traveling wrap which covered her from neck to foot, and
in which she had passed the night on the steamboat, too anxious to
sleep, she hardly showed for what she was, but her manner pleaded for
her more strongly than anything that she chose to say in evidence of her
right to admittance. She was permitted to see him alone.

What occurred during that distressing interview has never transpired;
but later events prove that Hardshaw had found means to subdue her will
to his own. She left the prison, a broken-hearted woman, refusing to
answer a single question, and returning to her desolate home renewed, in
a half-hearted way, her inquiries for her missing husband. A week later
she was herself missing: she had "gone back to the States"--nobody knew
any more than that.

On his trial the prisoner pleaded guilty--"by advice of his counsel," so
his counsel said. Nevertheless, the judge, in whose mind several unusual
circumstances had created a doubt, insisted on the district attorney
placing Officer No. 13 on the stand, and the deposition of Mrs. Barwell,
who was too ill to attend, was read to the jury. It was very brief: she
knew nothing of the matter except that the likeness of herself was her
property, and had, she thought, been left on the parlor table when she
had retired on the night of the arrest. She had intended it as a present
to her husband, then and still absent in Europe on business for a mining
company.

This witness's manner when making the deposition at her residence was
afterward described by the district attorney as most extraordinary.
Twice she had refused to testify, and once, when the deposition lacked
nothing but her signature, she had caught it from the clerk's hands and
torn it in pieces. She had called her children to the bedside and
embraced them with streaming eyes, then suddenly sending them from the
room, she verified her statement by oath and signature, and fai