“What did you come here for?”

Ford looked at her for the first time—­in a blankness not without a dull element of pleasure.  It was at least two or three years since he had seen anything so dainty—­not, in fact, since his own mother died.  At all times his mind worked slowly, so that he found nothing to reply till she repeated her question with a show of increased severity.

“I came here for protection,” he said then.

His hesitation and bewildered air imparted assurance to his still astonished hosts.

“Isn’t it an odd place in which to look for that?” Wayne asked, in an excitement, he strove to subdue.

The question was the stimulus Ford needed in order to get his wits into play.

“No,” he replied, slowly; “I’ve a right to protection from the man who sentenced me to death for a crime of which he knows me innocent.”

Wayne concealed a start by smoothing the newspaper over his crossed knees, but he was unable to keep a shade of thickness out of his voice as he answered: 

“You had a fair trial.  You were found guilty.  You have had the benefit of all the resources allowed by the law.  You have no right to say I know you to be innocent.”

Wholly spent, Ford dropped into a chair from which one of the children had risen.  With his arm hanging limply over the back he sat staring haggardly at the judge, as though finding nothing to say.

“I have a right to read any man’s mind,” he muttered, after a long pause, “when it’s as transparent as yours.  No one had any doubt as to your convictions—­after your charge.”

“That has nothing to do with it.  If I charged in your favor, it was because I wanted you to have the benefit of every possible plea.  When those pleas were found insufficient by a jury of your peers—­”

Ford emitted a sound that might have been a laugh, had there been mirth in it.

“A jury of my peers!  A lot of thick-headed country tradesmen, prejudiced against me from the start because I’d sometimes kicked up a row in their town!  They weren’t my peers any more than they were yours!”

“The law assumes all men to be equal—­”

“Just as it assumes all men to be intelligent—­only they’re not.  The law is a very fine theory.  The chief thing to be, said against it is that five times out of ten it leaves human nature out of account.  I’m condemned to death, not because I killed a man, but because you lawyers won’t admit that your theory doesn’t work.”

He began to speak more easily, with the energy born of his desperate situation and his sense of wrong.  He sat up straighter; the air of dejection with which he had sunk to the chair slipped from him; his gray eyes, of the kind called “honest,” shot out glances of protest.  The elder man found himself once more struggling against the wave of sympathy which at times in the court-room had been almost too strong for him.  He was forced to intrench himself mentally within the system he served before bracing himself to reply.