“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.  It will be the better place for him, and we will be happier in knowing we have done our duty in placing him there.  Abe Barrow is out of date.  He has missed step with the march of progress, and has been out of step for ten years, and it is best for all that he should remain out of it until he, who has sent nine other men unprepared to meet their God—­”

“He is not on trial for the murder of nine men,” interrupted Colonel Stogart, springing from his chair, “but for the justifiable killing of one, and I demand, your honor, that—­”

“—­has sent nine other men to meet their Maker,” continued the District Attorney, “meets with the awful judgment of a higher court than this.”

Colonel Stogart smiled scornfully at the platitude, and sat down with an expressive shrug; but no one noticed him.

The District Attorney raised his arm and faced the court-room.  “It cannot be said of us,” he cried, “that we have sat idle in the market-place.  We have advanced and advanced in the last ten years, until we have reached the very foremost place with civilized people.  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 court-house instead of a vigilance committee.  And what is his part in this new court-house, which to-day, for the first time, throws open its doors to protect the just and to punish the unjust?

“Is he there in the box among those honorable men, the gentlemen of the jury?  Is he in that great crowd of intelligent, public-spirited citizens who make the bone and sinew of this our fair city?  Is he on the honored bench dispensing justice, and making the intricacies of the law straight?  No, gentlemen; he has no part in our triumph.  He is there, in the prisoners’ pen, an outlaw, 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 man.  He has outlasted his time; he is a superfluity and an outrage on our reign of decency and order.  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 smile, where he will not even see the face of the warden who feeds him, nor sunlight except as it is filtered through the iron bars of a jail.  Bury him with the bitter past, with the lawlessness that has gone—­that has gone, thank God—­and which must not return.  Place him in the cell where he belongs, and whence, had justice been done, he would never have been taken alive.”