Colonel Stogart gave a stern look upward, and asked the prisoner's wife, in a whisper, if she knew what her husband meant to say, but she shook her head. She did not know. The District Attorney smiled indulgently at the prisoner and at the men about him, but they were watching the prisoner.
"That man there," said Barrow, pointing with one gaunt hand at the boy attorney, "told you I had no part or parcel in this city or in this world; that I belonged to the past; that I had ought to be dead. Now that's not so. I have just one thing that belongs to this city and this world—and to me; one thing that I couldn't take to jail with me, and that I'll have to leave behind me when I go back to it. I mean my wife."
The prisoner stopped, and looked so steadily at one place below him that those in the back of the court guessed for the first time that Mrs. Barrow was in the room, and craned forward to look at her, and there was a moment of confusion and a murmur of "Get back there!" "Sit still!" The prisoner turned to Judge Truax again and squared his broad shoulders, making the more conspicuous his narrow and sunken chest.
"You, sir," he said, quietly, with a change from the tone of braggadocio with which he had begun to speak, "remember her, sir, when I married her, twelve years ago. She was Henry Holman's daughter, he who owned the San Iago Ranch and the triangle brand. I took her from the home she had with her father against that gentleman's wishes, sir, to live with me over my dance-hall at the Silver Star. You may remember her as she was then. 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. I was drunk most of the time, or sleeping it off, and ugly-tempered when I was sober. There was shooting and carrying on all day and night down-stairs, and she didn't dare to leave her room. Besides that, she cared for me, and she was afraid every minute I was going to get killed. That's the way she lived for two years. Respectable women wouldn't speak to her because she was my wife; even them that were friends of hers when she lived on the ranch wouldn't speak to her on the street—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."
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.