It all happened a good many years ago, when Harrison Winthrop Coolidge, then a comparatively young man and newly married, had just come out from Massachusetts to be Governor of New Mexico.  His wife was a young woman of tall and shapely figure, handsome face, and striking presence, and possessed of such vivacity, vigor, health, and strength as few women enjoy.  Her superabundant vitality found many emergencies upon which to expend itself, but the man who told me this story declared that she never found one that was too big for her.  She probably never found a bigger or more important one than that which she faced on the night when she won her spurs.  Governor and Mrs. Coolidge reached New Mexico in the days of the first coming of the railroad, when the sleepy old Territory woke to a brief season of active and hilarious life.  And the Governor, fresh from New England reverence for law and legal forms and accepted methods, was inexpressibly shocked by the low opinion in which such things were held in his new bailiwick.  Especially was he horrified by the frequent and brief proceedings which left men who had been too free with their guns or with other people’s property hanging from trees, projecting beams, and other convenient places.  The usual rough justice of the affair did not, in his eyes, mitigate the offensiveness of its irregularity.

The Santa Fe Bugle at once interviewed him about his plans and intentions, and Governor Coolidge talked very strongly on the subject of lynch law.  He said that it was entirely wrong, unworthy even of barbarians, and was not to be endorsed or palliated in either principle or practice.  He deplored the frequency of its operations in New Mexico, and emphatically declared his intention of stamping it out.

And he took that opportunity to announce that all persons connected with lynching affairs would be treated as murderers or accessories to murder.

The editor of The Bugle, which was the organ of the opposition, published every word the Governor said, and then gleefully waited for something to happen.  He did not know what it would be, but he was perfectly sure there would be something, and that it would be interesting.

On the night after the interview was published Mrs. Coolidge awoke, possessed by an uneasy feeling that something unusual was taking place.  They were living then in the ancient adobe “Governor’s palace,” with its four-foot walls and its eventful history ante-dating the landing at Plymouth Rock, and for a half-waking instant she wondered if some unshriven victim of century-gone enmity and revenge still walked those old halls or sought its mortal habiliments among the rotting bones in the placita.  She listened and heard whispering voices and cautious movements in the portal that fronted the entire length of the building.  Then she arose, wrapped a long, dark cloak about her, and peeped out of the window.  Directly in front of their bedroom, in the portal, were three or four men who bore among them some long and heavy burden.  She drew her dark hair across her face, that there might be no white gleam to attract their attention, and crouched beside the window to watch.