The District Attorney sat down suddenly, with a quick nod to the Judge and the jury, and fumbled over his papers with nervous fingers.  He was keenly conscious, and excited with the fervor of his own words.  He heard the reluctantly hushed applause and the whispers of the crowd, and noted the quick and combined movement of the jury with a selfish sweet pleasure, which showed itself only in the tightening of the lips and nostrils.  Those nearest him tugged at his sleeve and shook hands with him.  He remembered this afterward as one of the rewards of the moment.  He turned the documents before him over and scribbled words upon a piece of paper and read a passage in an open law-book.  He did this quite mechanically, 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?”

The District Attorney turned his face, as did all the others, but he did not see the prisoner.  He still saw himself holding the court-room with a spell, and heard his own periods ringing against the whitewashed ceiling.  The others saw a tall, broad-shouldered man leaning heavily forward over the bar of the prisoner’s box.  His face was white with the prison tan, markedly so in contrast with those sunburnt by the wind and sun turned toward him, 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.

“I don’t know, Judge,” he said, hesitatingly, and staring stupidly at the mass of faces in the well beneath him, “that I have anything to say—­in my own behalf.  I don’t know as it would be any use.  I guess what the gentleman said about me is all there is to say.  He put it about right.  I’ve had my fun, and I’ve got to pay for it—­that is, I thought it was fun at the time.  I am not going to cry any baby act and beg off, or anything, if that’s what you mean.  But there is something I’d like to say if I thought you would believe me.”  He frowned down at the green table as though the words he wanted would not come, and his eyes wandered from one face to another, until they rested upon the bowed head of the only woman in the room.  They remained there for some short time, and then Barrow drew in his breath more quickly, and turned with something like a show of confidence to the jury.