"I don't know, Judge," he said, "that I have anything to say in my own behalf. I guess what the gentleman said about me is all there is to say. I am a back number, I am out of date; I was a loafer and a blackguard. He told you I had no part or parcel in this city, or in this world; that I belonged to the past; that I ought to be dead. Now that's not so. I have just one thing that belongs to this city, and to this world—and to me; one thing that I couldn't take to jail with me, and I'll have to leave behind me when I go back to it. I mean my wife. You, sir, remember her, sir, when I married her twelve years ago. She gave up everything a woman ought to have, to come to me. She thought she was going to be happy with me; that's why she come, I guess. Maybe she was happy for about two weeks. After that first two weeks her life, sir, was a hell, and I made it a hell. Respectable women wouldn't speak to her because she was my wife—and she had no children. That was her life. She lived alone over the dance-hall, and sometimes when I was drunk—I beat her.
"At the end of two years I killed Welsh, and they sent me to the pen 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.
"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.
"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. 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, I can't! It's too late! It's too late! Don't send me back for life! Give me a few years to work for her—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. My God! Judge, don't bury me alive, as that man asked you to. Give me this last chance. Let me prove that what I'm saying is true."
Judge Truax looked at the papers on his desk for some seconds, and raised his head, coughing as he did so.
"It lies—it lies at the discretion of this Court to sentence the prisoner to a term of imprisonment of two years, or for an indefinite period, or for life. Owing to—on account of certain circumstances which were—have arisen—this sentence is suspended. This Court stands adjourned."