Text 23: Roy Bean, d. 1903

In the days when the western part of the USA was known as Wild West law was upheld by very rough and ready men. 'Judge' Bean, as he called himself, was one of the most colourful of the lawmen. As a young man he had been a slaver, driven an ammunition truck in the war against Mexico, smuggled cotton and been tried. He became famous as Justice of the Peace in a town called Vinegarroon. Here, in a saloon called the Jersey Lilly — so named after the actress Lily Langtree of whom he was a fan — he held the court. His justice was as rough as the people he tried and he built up an enormous reputation, so that many tales were told about him. One is that he decided on one occasion that a man accused of murdering a Chinaman might call on his tough friends to make trouble for the judge. Looking through his law books he announced that he could not find anywhere that it said that you must not kill a Chinaman!

Text 24: Butch Cassidy, 1866—1910 and the Sundance Kid, d. 1910

Butch Cassidy, whose real name was Robert Leroy Parker, was the leader of a gang of American outlaws called the Wild Bunch who operated mainly from a secure hideout in Wyoming Territory called Hole in the Wall. Other members of the gang were the Sundance Kid (real name Harry Longbaugh), Bill 'News' Carver, Ben Kilpatrick and Harvey Logan. The Wild Bunch rustled cattle, held up banks and robbed trains, all with varied success. On one occasion they stole $40,000 in notes that were so new that they had not been signed, and their clumsy attempts to forge the signatures failed miserably. Having made things too hot for themselves by robbing the Union Pacific railway rather too frequently, in 1902 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid moved to South America accompanied by pretty schoolteacher Etta Place. This combination carried out a number of robberies, before the two outlaws were ambushed and killed in a gunfight with the Bolivian army in 1910. However, rumours persist that either one or both men returned to the USA and lived on peacefully to die of old age. The film of their life and death, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, managed to catch the flavour of criminal exploits almost perfectly.

Text 25: Mata Hari (born Gertruda Margarete Zelle), 1876—1917

Mata Hari, who was executed by a firing squad in France in October 1917, is probably the most famous spy of all time. She is renown for her beauty, her numerous military lovers, her provocative oriental dancing, and, above all, her espionage. Yet in fact, she was not oriental, or even a spy. Mata Hari was a stage name adopted by a plump middle-aged Dutch divorcee, named Mrs. Margaretha MacLeod, who had left her alcoholic bcottish husband and opted to become a dancer in Europe. The evidence of her alleged espionage on behalf of the German Kaiser is based merely on her being mistaken for a well-known German agent Clara Benedix, by the British in November 1916. In that month Mrs. MacLeod was arrested in Falmouth, Cornwall, on board of the ship Hollandia while she was on her way to Holland. The police released her when they realised the mistake. Later she was arrested in France and charged with having been in contact with German intelligence officers in Madrid (though she had never even been there). At her trial in Paris her lurid life-style was used to damning effect It was only in 1963, when the secret files relating to her case were released, that the legend was reassessed. Most historians now think that, far from being a spy, Mata Hari was simply an innocent scapegoat — shot because the French government wanted to cover up its military ineptitude by fabricating an all-powerful ring of German agents.