|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 24
"All that man said of me is true," he said. He gave a toss of his
hands as a man throws away the reins. "I admit all he says. I
_am_ a back number; I _am_ out of date; I _was_ a loafer and a
blackguard. I never shot any man in the back, nor I never assassinated
no one; but that's neither here nor there. I'm not in a place where I
can expect people to pick out their words; but, as he says, I _am_ a
bad lot. He says I have enjoyed a reputation as a desperado. I am not
bragging of that; I just ask you to remember that he said it. Remember
it of me. I was not the sort to back down to man or beast, and I'm not
now. I am not backing down, now; I'm taking my punishment. Whatever
you please to make it, I'll take it; and that," he went on, more
slowly, "makes it harder for me to ask what I want to ask, and make
you all believe I am not asking it for myself."
He stopped, and the silence in the room seemed to give him some faint
encouragement of sympathy, though it was rather the silence of
curiosity.
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."
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|