Public Speaking: Principles and Practice

by Irvah Lester Winter

From "The Boy Orator of Zepata City" in "The Exiles and Other Stories."
Copyrighted, 1894, Harper and Brothers. Reprinted with permission.

BY RICHARD HARDING DAVIS

Abe Barrow had been closely associated with the early history of Zepata; he had killed in his day several of the Zepata citizens. His fight with Thompson had been a fair fight—as those said who remembered it—and Thompson was a man they could well spare; but the case against Barrow had been prepared by the new and youthful district attorney, and the people were satisfied and grateful.

Harry Harvey, "The Boy Orator of Zepata City," as he was called, turned slowly on his heels, and swept the court room carelessly with a glance of his clever black eyes. The moment was his.

"This man," he said, and as he spoke even the wind in the corridors hushed for the moment, "is no part or parcel of Zepata city of to-day. He comes to us a relic of the past—a past that was full of hardships and glorious efforts in the face of daily disappointments, embitterments and rebuffs. But the part this man played in that past lives only in the court records of that day. This man, Abe Barrow, enjoys, and has enjoyed, a reputation as a 'bad man,' a desperate and brutal ruffian. Free him to-day, and you set a premium on such reputations; acquit him of this crime, and you encourage others to like evil. Let him go, and he will walk the streets with a swagger, and boast that you were afraid to touch him—afraid, gentlemen—and children and women will point after him as the man who has sent nine others into eternity, and who yet walks the streets a free man. And he will become, in the eyes of the young and the weak, a hero and a god.

"For the last ten years, your honor, this man, Abner Barrow, has been serving a term of imprisonment in the state penitentiary; I ask you to send him back there again for the remainder of his life. Abe Barrow is out of date. This Rip Van Winkle of the past returns to find a city where he left a prairie town; a bank where he spun his roulette-wheel; this magnificent courthouse instead of a vigilance committee! He is there, in the prisoner's pen, a convicted murderer and an unconvicted assassin, the last of his race,—the bullies and bad men of the border,—a thing to be forgotten and put away forever from the sight of men. And I ask you, gentlemen, to put him away where he will not hear the voice of man nor children's laughter, nor see a woman's smile. Bury him with the bitter past, with the lawlessness that has gone—that has gone, thank God—and which must not return."

The district attorney sat down suddenly, and was conscious of nothing until the foreman pronounced the prisoner at the bar guilty of murder in the second degree.

Judge Truax leaned across his desk and said, simply, that it lay in his power to sentence the prisoner to not less than two years' confinement in the state penitentiary, or for the remainder of his life.

"Before I deliver sentence on you, Abner Barrow," he said with an old man's kind severity, "is there anything you have to say on your own behalf?"

Barrow's face was white with the prison tan, and pinched and hollow- eyed and worn. When he spoke his voice had the huskiness which comes from non-use, and cracked and broke like a child's.