He had been holding both halves of that in his hands for twenty years, waiting.

I found, somewhat to my own surprise, that I felt no joy at the thought of those men in their courtrooms, no hunger for their suffering.

What I felt was something quieter and more complete.

It was the feeling of a thing set right, of a balance long violently tilted finally coming level.

Those men had stolen a man’s work, his freedom, his name, and twenty years of his life, and had forced a mother into hiding and a child into a fatherless childhood, and for two decades they had prospered while their victim rotted in a bare room.

That the account was now being settled, lawfully, thoroughly, in the daylight of a federal courtroom, did not make me want to gloat.