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The man’s white face reddened slowly as he said this; and he stopped, and then continued more quickly, with his eyes still fixed on those of the Judge:

“At the end of two years I killed Welsh, and they sent me to the penitentiary for ten years, and she was free. She could have gone back to her folks and got a divorce if she’d wanted to, and never seen me again. It was an escape most women’d gone down on their knees and thanked their Maker for, and blessed the day they’d been freed from a blackguardly drunken brute.

“But what did this woman do–my wife, the woman I misused and beat and dragged down in the mud with me? She was too mighty proud to go back to her people or to the friends who shook her when she was in trouble; and she sold out the place, and bought a ranch with the money, and worked it by herself, worked it day and night, until in ten years she had made herself an old woman, as you see she is to-day.

“And for what? To get me free again; to bring me things to eat in jail, and picture papers and tobacco–when she was living on bacon and potatoes, and drinking alkali water–working to pay for a lawyer to fight for me–to pay for the best lawyer! She worked in the fields with her own hands, planting and ploughing, working as I never worked for myself in my whole lazy, rotten life. That’s what that woman there did for me.”

The man stopped suddenly, and turned with a puzzled look toward where his wife sat, for she had dropped her head on the table in front of her, and he had heard her sobbing.

“And what I want to ask of you, sir, is to let me have two years out of jail to show her how I feel about it. I ask you not to send me back for life, sir. Give me just two years–two years of my life while I have some strength left to work for her as she worked for me. I only want to show her how I care for her now. I had the chance, and I wouldn’t take it; and now, sir, I want to show her that I know and understand–now, when it’s too late. It’s all I’ve thought of when I was in jail, to be able to see her sitting in her own kitchen with her hands folded, and me working and sweating in the fields for her–working till every bone ached, trying to make it up to her.

“And I can’t!” the man cried, suddenly, losing the control he had forced upon himself, and tossing his hands up above his head, and with his eyes fixed hopelessly on the bowed head below him. “I can’t! It’s too late. It’s too late!”

He turned and faced the crowd and the District Attorney defiantly.

“I’m not crying for the men I killed. They’re dead. I can’t bring them back. But she’s not dead, and I treated her worse than I treated them. She never harmed me, nor got in my way, nor angered me. And now, when I want to do what I can for her in the little time that’s left, he tells you I’m a ‘relic of the past,’ that civilization’s too good for me, that you must bury me until it’s time to bury me for good. Just when I’ve got something I must live for, something I’ve got to do. Don’t you believe me? Don’t you understand?”

He turned again toward the Judge, and beat the rail before him impotently with his wasted hand. “Don’t send me back for life!” he cried. “Give me a few years to work for her–two years, one year–to show her what I feel here, what I never felt for her before. Look at her, gentlemen. Look how worn she is and poorly, and look at her hands, and you men must feel how I feel. I don’t ask you for myself. I don’t want to go free on my own account. I am asking it for that woman–yes, and for myself, too. I am playing to ‘get back,’ gentlemen. I’ve lost what I had, and I want to get back; and,” he cried, querulously, “the game keeps going against me. It’s only a few years’ freedom I want. Send me back for thirty years, but not for life. My God! Judge, don’t bury me alive, as that man asked you to. I’m not civilized, maybe; ways have changed. You are not the man I knew; you are all strangers to me. But I could learn. I wouldn’t bother you in the old way. I only want to live with her. I won’t harm the rest of you. Give me this last chance. Let me prove that what I’m saying is true.”