Sage bowed his head and spoke in a low tone, his gaze fixed upon the floor.
“It was to get another look at my mother’s face that I returned to Oakdale. I was here a week ago, and I went away without obtaining a glimpse of her. In all the years that I was supposed to be dead I have carried her image in my heart, and it was the knowledge of her faith in me—for she never believed me guilty—that kept me straight, I believe. I’ve knocked about in many places and associated with all sorts of men, some of them honest, but many more who were crooks. I’ve roughed it in Alaska, sailed before the mast, starved and nearly died from fever in the Philippines, tried my hand at coal mining in Australia; and through it all the knowledge of my mother’s faith has kept me straight, even though I’ve had many a chance to turn a good thing by crookedness. At last, believing there was little danger, I came back and hunted for my people. I found them here, and here I have likewise found my undoing.”
“Tough luck,” said Riley again. “They’ll send you back to the jug.”
“No doubt of it. I’ll have to serve out my term, with an additional period hitched on to it because of my break. There’s water in my veins, Riley; the dread of what I’m up against takes the heart out of me. Perhaps you don’t know what it is to be sent to prison with the knowledge that you’re innocent and serving time for the crime of another man.”
“It must be fierce,” said Riley sympathetically. “And you say he put it on you at the trial? Pal, if I was in your boots, he’d get hisn some day. When I’d done my turn and been discharged, I’d look the gent up and hand him something he’d remember—if he was in shape to remember anything.”
“That would be poor satisfaction to me. It wouldn’t clear my name of the crime. It might mean that I’d be sent up again for another, still greater, crime. The only thing in this wide world that can ever give me the least satisfaction is proof of my innocence. I’ve dreamed of it—dreamed of it a million times. I’ve dreamed of standing before the world free and exonerated. Of going to my old mother and feeling her arms about my neck and her tears upon my cheeks, and hearing her glad cry, ‘I knew it, my boy—I knew it!’ Nothing but that, Riley, can ever satisfy me, and if there’s any justice under Heaven it will come some day.”