The Mother-in-Law’s Vengeance

A tall, angular woman in a sun-bonnet, with a stride like a man late for a train, came into a recorder's office recently and took a seat on the end of a bench near where the city marshal was at work at his desk. She removed her bonnet, laid it across her knees, removed her spectacles, and after snapping her eyes a couple of times at the city marshal, asked in a voice sounding like sharpening a cross-cut saw: 'Be you the man that locks people up?' 'Sometimes I find it requisite to appeal to that extreme measure,' answered the official. 'I know all that, but be you the man?' 'Yes, madame.' 'Well, why didn't you say so when I asked you?' 'I did.' 'I say you didn't.' 'What do you want, madame?' asked the city marshal. 'I want the good-for-nothing skunk that married my darter, locked up.' 'What has he done?' 'Yes, what's he done, the vile wretch!' she breathed hard, glared about, and gritted her teeth, until the officer felt in his pocket for his police whistle. 'Be calm, madame; compose your feelings,' argued the marshal. 'He told me—if I just had him alone for two minutes—what a picture he would make.' 'Continue, madame.' 'I overheard him telling my darter he'd give 420 acres of land with a gold mine on it to anybody who would amputate my jaw with a bootjack,' said she. 'What in the world could have induced him to say that?' observed the official. 'I got him by the hair and dragged him across the kitchen table with one hand, and only hit a time or so with the long-handled skillet, and he was callin' me mother dear and all that sort of nonsense—' 'You let up on him—you felt so sorry for him,' observed the marshal. 'Yes, I felt sorry at his hair givin' way. It looked like Providence was agin me. Mebbe I'll never get to lay hands on him no more. It would be just my luck never to fetch him another clip.' 'What do you want me to do?' asked the officer. 'If you catch him, just lock him up and send for me; that's all. I am a law-abiding woman. I've notified the civil authorities to catch him for me. You will know him by the place where I hit him with the skillet, the little, worthless, spindle-shanked, goggle-eyed, brass whelp. Wanted to amputate my jaw, did he?' 'I really can't imagine what he meant by that remark,' observed the officer of the law, as she went out; 'it's perfectly incomprehensible.'