THE BOY ORATOR OF ZEPATA CITY. It seemed a particularly happy and appropriate circumstance that the first business in the new courtroom should be, of itself, of an important and momentous nature, something that dealt not only with the present, but with the past of Zepata. Abe Barrow had been closely associated with the early history of Zepata; he had killed in his day several of the Zepata citizens, and two visiting brother-desperadoes, and the corner where his gambling-house had stood was still known as Barrow's Corner. Ten years before, the murder of Deputy-Sheriff Welsh had led him to the penitentiary, and a month previous to the opening of the new courthouse he had been freed, and arrested at the prison gate to stand trial for the murder of Hubert Thompson. The fight with Thompson had been a fair fight-as those said who remembered it—and Thompson was a man they could well spare; but the case against Barrow had been prepared during his incarceration by the new and youthful district attorney, "Judge" Henry Harvey, and as it offered a fitting sacrifice for the dedication of the new temple of justice, the people were satisfied and grateful. Barrow's wife, a thin, yellow-faced woman in a meanfitting, showy gown, sat at the district attorney's elbow. She was the only woman in the room. Harry Harvey, "The Boy Orator of Zepata City, as he was called, turned slowly on his heels, and swept the courtroom carelessly with a glance of his clever black eyes. The moment was his. He saw all the men he knew the men who made his little world - crowding silently forward, forgetful of the heat, of the suffocating crush of those about them, of the wind that rattled the doors in the corridors, and conscious only of him. "This man, he said, and as he spoke even the wind in the corridors hushed for the moment, "is no part or parcel of Zepata City of to-day. He comes to us a relic of the past, a past that was full of hardships and glorious efforts in the face of daily disappointments, embitterments, and rebuffs. But the part this man played in that past, lives only in the rude court-records of that day, in the traditions of the gambling-hell and the saloons, and on the headstones of his victims. Gentlemen, the 'bad man' has become an unknown quantity in Zepata City. It lies with you to see that he remains so. This man, Abe Barrow, has enjoyed a reputation as a 'bad man,' a desperate and brutal ruffian. Free him to-day, and you set a premium on such reputations. Acquit him of this crime, and you encourage others to like evil. Let him go, and he will walk the streets with a swagger, and boast that you were afraid to touch him-afraid, gentlemen-and children and women will point after him as the man who has sent nine others into eternity, and who yet walks the street a free man. "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. Abe Barrow is out of date. He has missed step with the march of progress, and has been out of step for ten years. It cannot be said of us 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 courthouse instead of a vigilance committee! He is there, in the prisoner's pen, 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 men. 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. The district attorney sat down suddenly, 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 courtroom 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 towards 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, that I have anything to say in my own behalf. I guess what the gentleman said about me is all there is to say. of date; I was a loafer and a blackguard. He told you I had no part or parcel in this city, or in this world; that I belonged to the past; that I ought to be dead. Now that's not so. I have just one thing that belongs to this city, and to this world—and to me; one thing that I could n'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. You, sir, remember her, sir, when I married her twelve years ago. She was Henry Holman's daughter. I took her from the home she had with her father against that gentleman's wishes, sir, to live with me over my dancehall. 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. Respectable women would n't speak to her because she was my wife; even them that were friends of hers when she lived on the ranch, would n't speak to her because she was my wife-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. I am a back number, I am out "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. “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 tobaccowhen 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. The man stopped suddenly and turned with a puzzled look towards 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. 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. -to show "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 before him. "I can't! It's too late! It's too late! Don't send me back for life! Give me a few years to work for her-two years, one year,her what I feel here, what I never felt for her before. Look at her, gentlemen, look how worn she is, and poorly, and look at her hands, and you men must feel how I feel -I don't ask you for myself. I don't want to go free on my own account. My God! Judge, do n't bury me alive, as that man asked you to. I only want to live with her. Give me this last chance. Let me prove that what I'm saying is true." The man stopped and stood, searching with desperate eagerness from face to face. The gentlemen of the jury sat quite motionless, looking straight ahead. No one moved until there was a sudden stir around the district attorney's table, and the men stepped aside and let the woman pass them and throw herself against the prisoner's box. The prisoner bent his tall, gaunt figure over the rail, and as the woman pressed his one hand against her face, touched her shoulders with the other awkwardly. "There now, do n't you take on so. Now you know how I feel, it's all right; do n't take on. Judge Truax looked at the paper on his desk for some seconds, and raised his head, coughing as he did so. "It lies-" Judge Truax began, and then stopped, and began again in a more certain tone. "It lies at the discretion of this court to sentence the prisoner to a term of imprisonment of two years, or for an indefinite period, or for life. Owing to- On account of certain circumstances which were-have arisen-this sentence is suspended. This court stands adjourned.” As he finished, he sprang out of his chair impulsively, and placed his hand upon the district attorney's shoulder. "Harry! Harry, my boy, could you go to Austin and repeat the speech that man has just made to the governor?" The boy orator laughed, and took one of the older man's hands in both of his, and pressed it quickly. "I'd like mighty well to try," he said. Richard Harding Davis. YE MARINERS OF ENGLAND. Ye mariners of England, That guard our native seas; Whose flag has braved, a thousand years, Your glorious standard launch again And sweep through the deep, While the stormy winds do blow; While the battle rages loud and long, |