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.

“And I can’t!” the man cried, suddenly, losing the control he had forced upon himself, and tossing his hands up above his head, and with his eyes fixed hopelessly on the bowed head below him.  “I can’t!  It’s too late.  It’s too late!”