"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!" He turned and faced the crowd and the District Attorney defiantly. "I'm not crying for the men I killed. They're dead. I can't bring them back. But she's not dead, and I treated her worse than I treated them. _She_ never harmed me, nor got in my way, nor angered me. And now, when I want to do what I can for her in the little time that's left, _he_ tells you I'm a 'relic of the past,' that civilization's too good for me, that you must bury me until it's time to bury me for good. Just when I've got something I _must_ live for, something I've got to do. Don't you believe me? Don't you understand?"