CHAPTER XIITHE SUNBEAM ON THE WALL

188CHAPTER XIITHE SUNBEAM ON THE WALL

The sheriff was a mild-mannered man, whose head was shaped like the end of a watermelon. His hair was close-cut and very thin at the top, due to the fact that all the nourishing substances both inside and outside his head, or any way appertaining thereto, went into the maintenance of the sheriff’s mustache, which was at least twice as large as Bill Frost’s.This, of course, was as it should have been, for even the poorest kind of a sheriff is more than twice as important as the very best sort of constable. In those days it was the custom for sheriffs in that part of the country to train up these prodigious mustaches, perhaps in the belief that such adornments lent them the appearance of competence and valor, of which endowments nature had given them no other testimonial. In any event it is known that many a two-inch sheriff took his stand behind an eight-inch mustache, and walked boldly in the honor of his constituents.The sheriff of Shelbyville was a type of this class, both in mental depth and facial adornment. He was exceedingly jealous of his power, and it was his belief that too many liberties permitted a prisoner, and too many favors shown, acted in contravention of the law’s intent as interpreted by the prosecuting attorney; namely, that a person under the cloud of accusation should be treated as guilty until able to prove himself innocent. Therefore the sheriff would not allow Joe Newbolt to leave his cell to meet visitors after his arraignment.The meeting between the prisoner and his mother in the189office of the jail was to be the last of that sort; all who came in future must see him at the door of his cell. That was the rule laid down to Joe when he parted from his mother and Colonel Price that day.As a cell in a prison-house, perhaps Joe’s place of confinement was fairly comfortable. It was situated in the basement of the old court-house, where there was at least light enough to contemplate one’s misery by, and sufficient air to set one longing for the fields. There was but one other prisoner, a horse-thief, waiting for trial.This loquacious fellow, who was lodged directly across the corridor, took great pains to let Joe see the admiration and esteem in which he held him on account of the distinguished charge under which he was confined. He annoyed Joe to such extent that he asked the sheriff that evening to shift them about if possible.“Well, I’ll move him if you say so, but I left him there because I thought he’d be company for you,” said the sheriff. “I don’t mind talkin’ in this jail when there’s no more than two in it.”“I don’t want to talk,” said Joe.So the horse-thief was removed to the farther end of the corridor, where he kept up a knocking on the bars of his cell during the early hours of the night, and then turned off his diversion by imitating the sound of a saw on steel, which he could do with his tongue against his teeth with such realism as to bring the sheriff down in his nightshirt, with a lantern in one hand and a shotgun in the other.Joe’s second night in jail passed very much like the first, when they had brought him there all bewildered and dazed. There was a grated window in the wall above his reach, through which he could see the branches of an elm-tree, blowing bare of leaves; beyond that a bit of sky. Joe sat on the edge of his cot that second night a long time after the stars190came out, gazing up at the bar-broken bit of sky, reviewing the events leading up to his situation.There was no resentment in him against the jury of his neighbors whose finding had sent him to jail under the cloud of that terrible accusation; he harbored no ill-feeling for the busy, prying little coroner, who had questioned him so impertinently. There was one person alone, in the whole world of men, to blame, and that was Curtis Morgan. He could not have been far away on the day of the inquest; news of the tragic outcome of Ollie’s attempt to join him must have traveled to his ears.Yet he had not come forward to take the load of suspicion from Joe’s shoulders by confessing the treacherous thing that he had plotted. He need not have revealed the complete story of his trespass upon the honor of Isom Chase, thought Joe; he could have saved Ollie’s name before the neighbors; and yet relieved Joe of all suspicion. Now that Isom was dead, he could have married her. But Morgan had not come. He was a coward as well as a rascal. It was more than likely that, in fear of being found out, he had fled away.And suppose that he never came back; suppose that Ollie should not elect to stand forth and explain the hidden part of that night’s tragedy? She could not be expected, within reason, to do this. Even the thought that she might weaken and do so was abhorrent to Joe. It was not a woman’s part to make a sacrifice like that; the world did not expect it of her. It rested with Morgan, the traitor to hospitality; Morgan, the ingratiating scoundrel, to come forward and set him free. Morgan alone could act honorably in that clouded case; but if he should elect to remain hidden and silent, who would be left to answer but Joe Newbolt?And should he reveal the thing that would bring him liberty? Was freedom more precious than his honor, and the honor of a poor, shrinking, deluded woman?191No. He was bound by a gentleman’s obligation; self-assumed, self-appointed. He could not tell.But what a terrible situation, what an awful outlook for him in such event! They hung men for murder on the jail-yard gallows, with a knot of rope behind the left ear and a black cap over the face. And such a death left a stain upon the name that nothing would purify. It was an attainder upon generations unborn.Joe walked his cell in the agony of his sudden and acute understanding of the desperate length to which this thing might carry him. Hammer had protested, with much show of certainty, that he would get him off without much difficulty. But perhaps Hammer was counting on him to reveal what he had kept to himself at the inquest. What should he do about that in his relations with Hammer? Should he tell him about Morgan, and have him set men on his track to drag him back and make him tell the truth? Granting that they found him, who was there to make him speak?Could not Morgan and Ollie, to cover their own shame and blame, form a pact of silence or denial and turn back his good intentions in the form of condemnation upon his own head? How improbable and unworthy of belief his tale, with its reservations and evasions, would sound to a jury with Morgan and Ollie silent.The fright of his situation made him feverish; he felt that he could tear at the walls with his hands, and scream, and scream until his heart would burst. He was unmanned there in the dark. He began to realize this finally after his frenzy had thrown him into a fever. He gave over his pacing of the little cell, and sat down again to reason and plan.Hammer had made so much talk about the papers which he would get ready that Joe had been considerably impressed. He saw now that it would require something more than papers to make people understand that he had a gentleman’s reason,192and not a thief’s, for concealing what they had pressed him to reveal.There was a woman first, and that was about all that Joe could make of the situation up to that time. She must be protected, even though unworthy. None knew of that taint upon her but himself and the fugitive author of it, but Joe could not bring himself to contemplate liberty bought at the price of her public degradation. This conclusion refreshed him, and dispelled the phantoms from his hot brain.After the sounds of the town had fallen quiet, and the knocking of feet on the pavement along his prison wall had ceased, Joe slept. He woke steady, and himself again, long before he could see the sun, yellow on the boughs of the elm-tree.The sheriff furnished him a piece of comb, and he smoothed his hair by guess, a desperate character, such as he was accounted by the officer, not being allowed the luxury of a mirror. One might lick the quicksilver from the back of a mirror, or open an artery with a fragment of it, or even pound the glass and swallow it. Almost anything was nicer than hanging, so the sheriff said.Scant as the food had been at Isom’s until his revolt had forced a revision of the old man’s lifelong standard, Joe felt that morning after his second jail breakfast that he would have welcomed even a hog-jowl and beans. The sheriff was allowed but forty cents a day for the maintenance of each prisoner, and, counting out the twenty-five cents profit which he felt as a politician in good standing to be his due, the prisoners’ picking was very lean indeed.That morning Joe’s breakfast had been corn-pone, cold, with no lubricant to ease it down the lane. There had been a certain squeamish liquid in addition, which gave off the smell of a burning straw-stack, served in a large tin cup. Joe had not tasted it, but his nose had told him that it was193“wheat coffee,” a brew which his mother had made sometimes in the old days of their darkest adversity.Joe knew from the experience of the previous day that there would be nothing more offered to fortify the stomach until evening. The horse-thief called up from his end of the jail, asking Joe how he liked the fare.Reserved as Joe was disposed to be toward him, he expressed himself somewhat fully on the subject of the sheriff’s cuisine. The horse-thief suggested a petition to the county court or a letter to the sheriff’s political opponent. He said that his experience in jails had been that a complaint on the food along about election time always brought good results. Joe was not interested in the matter to that extent. He told the fellow that he did not expect to be a permanent occupant of the jail.“You think you’ll go down the river for a double-nine?” he asked.“I don’t know what you mean,” said Joe.“To the pen for life, kid; that’s what I mean.”“I don’t know,” said Joe gloomily.“Well, say, I tell you, if they give you the other,” said the friendly thief, lifting his naturally high voice to make it carry along the echoing passage, “you’ll git plenty to eat, and three times a day, too. When they put a feller in the death-cell they pass in the finest chuck in the land. You know, if a feller’s got a smart lawyer he can keep up that line of eatin’ for maybe two or three years by appealin’ his case and dodges like that.”“I don’t want to talk,” said Joe.“Oh, all right, kid,” said the thief flippantly. Then he rattled his grated door to draw Joe’s attention.“But, ’y God, kid, the day’s comin’ to you when you will want to talk, and when you’d give the teeth out of your mouth, and nearly the eyes out of your head, for the sound194of a friendly human voice aimed at you. Let ’em take you off down the river to Jeff’ City and put you behind them tall walls once, where the best you hear’s a cuss from a guard, and where you march along with your hands on the shoulders of the man in front of you; and another one behind you does the same to you, and their eyes all down and their faces the color of corpses, andthenyou’ll know!“You’ll hear them old fellers, them long-timers, whisperin’ in the night, talkin’ to theirselves, and it’ll sound to you like wind in the grass. And you’ll think of grass and trees and things like that on the outside, and you’ll feel like you want to ram your head ag’in’ the wall and yell. Maybe you’ll do it–plenty of ’em does–and then they’ll give you the water-cure, they’ll force it down you with a hose till you think you’ll bust. I tell you, kid, Iknow, ’y God! I’ve been there–but not for no double-nine like they’ll give you.”The man’s voice seemed to be hanging and sounding yet in the corridor, even after he was silent, his cruel picture standing in distorted fancy before Joe’s eyes. Joe wiped the sweat from his forehead, breathing through his open mouth.“Well, maybe they won’t, though,” said the fellow, resuming as if after considering it, “maybe they’ll give you the quick and painless, I don’t know.”Joe had been standing at his cell door, drawn to listen to the lecture of his fellow prisoner, terrible, hopeless, as it sounded in his ears. Now he sat on his bedside again, feeling that this was indeed a true forecast of his own doom. The sun seemed already shut out from him in the morning of his day, the prison silence settling, never to be broken again in those shadows where shuffling men filed by, with eyes downcast and faces gray, like the faces of the dead.Life without liberty would be a barren field, he knew; but liberty without honor would yield no sweeter fruit. And who was there in the world of honorable men to respect a coward195who had saved his own skin from the fire by stripping a frail woman’s back to the brand? A gentleman couldn’t do it, said Joe, at the end, coming back from his sweating race with fear to the starting-place, a good deal cooled, not a little ashamed.Let them use him as they might; he would stand by his first position in the matter. He would have to keep on lying, as he had begun; but it would be repeating an honorable lie, and no man ever went to hell for that.The sun was coming through the high cell window, broadening its oblique beam upon the wall. Looking up at it, Joe thought that it must be mid-morning. Now that his panic was past, his stomach began to make a gnawing and insistent demand for food. Many a heavy hour must march by, thought he, before the sheriff came with his beggarly portion. He felt that in case he should be called upon to endure imprisonment long he must fall away to a skeleton and die.In his end of the corridor the horse-thief was still, and Joe was glad of it. No matter how earnestly he might come to desire the sound of a human voice in time, he did not want to hear the horse-thief’s then, nor any other that prophesied such disquieting things.There was a barred gate across the corridor at the foot of the stairs which led up to the sheriff’s office. Joe’s heart jumped with the hope that it was his mother coming when he heard the key in the lock and voices at the grating.“Right down there, to the right,” the sheriff was directing. “When you want to leave just come here and rattle the lock. I can’t take no chances bringin’ such desperate fellers as him up to the office, colonel. You can see that as well as me.”What Colonel Price replied Joe could not hear, for his low-modulated voice of culture was like velvet beside a horse-blanket compared to the sheriff’s.196“I’m over on this side, colonel, sir,” said Joe before he could see him.And then the colonel stepped into the light which came through the cell window, bringing with him one who seemed as fair to Joe in that somber place as the bright creatures who stood before Jacob in Bethel that night he slept with his head upon a stone.“This is my daughter,” said Colonel Price. “We called in to kind of cheer you up.”She offered Joe her hand between the bars; his went forward to meet it gropingly, for it lacked the guidance of his eyes.Joe was honey-bound, like an eager bee in the heart of some great golden flower, tangled and leashed in a thousand strands of her hair. The lone sunbeam of his prison had slipped beyond the lintel of his low door, as if it had timed its coming to welcome her, and now it lay like a hand in benediction above her brow.Her hair was as brown as wild honey; a golden glint lay in it here and there under the sun, like the honeycomb. A smile kindled in her brown eyes as she looked at him, and ran out to the corners of them in little crinkles, then moved slowly upon her lips. Her face was quick with the eagerness of youth, and she was tall.“I’m surely beholden to you, Miss Price, for this favor,” said Joe, lapsing into the Kentucky mode of speech, “and I’m ashamed to be caught in such a place as this.”“You have nothing to be ashamed of,” said she; “we know you are innocent.”“Thank you kindly, Miss Price,” said he with quaint, old courtesy that came to him from some cavalier of Cromwell’s day.“I thought you’d better meet Alice,” explained the colonel, “and get acquainted with her, for young people have tastes197in common that old codgers like me have outgrown. She might see some way that I would overlook to make you more comfortable here during the time you will be obliged to wait.”“Yes, sir,” said Joe, hearing the colonel’s voice, but not making much out of what he was saying.He was thinking that out of the gloom of his late cogitations she had come, like hope hastening to refute the argument of the horse-thief. His case could not be so despairing with one like her believing in him. It was a matter beyond a person such as a horse-thief, of course. One of a finer nature could understand.“Father spoke of some books,” she ventured; “if you will––”Her voice was checked suddenly by a sound which rose out of the farther end of the corridor and made her start and clutch her father’s arm. Joe pressed his face against the bars and looked along at his fellow prisoner, who was dragging his tin cup over the bars of his cell door with rapid strokes.When the thief saw that he had drawn the attention of the visitors, he thrust his arm out and beckoned to the colonel. “Mister, I want to ask you to do me a little turn of a favor,” he begged in a voice new to Joe, so full of anguish, so tremulous and weak. “I want you to carry out to the world and put in the papers the last message of a dyin’ man!”“What’s the matter with you, you poor wretch?” asked the colonel, moved to pity.“Don’t pay any attention to him,” advised Joe; “he’s only acting up. He’s as strong as I am. I think he wants to beg from you.”The colonel turned away from him to resume his conference with Joe, and the horse-thief once more rattled his cup across the bars.“That noise is very annoying,” said the colonel, turning198to the man tartly. “Stop it now, before I call the sheriff!”“Friend, it’s a starvin’ man that’s appealin’ to you,” said the prisoner, “it’s a man that ain’t had a full meal in three weeks. Ask that gentleman what we git here, let him tell you what this here sheriff that’s up for election agin serves to us poor fellers. Corn dodger for breakfast, so cold you could keep fish on it, and as hard as the rocks in this wall! That’s what we git, and that’s all we git. Ask your friend.”“Is he telling the truth?” asked the colonel, looking curiously at Joe.“I’m afraid he is, colonel, sir.”“I’ll talk to him,” said the colonel.In a moment he was listening to the horse-thief’s earnest relation of the hardships which he had suffered in the Shelbyville jail, and Joe and Alice were standing face to face, with less than a yard’s space between them, but a barrier there as insuperable as an alp.He wanted to say something to cause her to speak again, for her low voice was as wonderful to him as the sound of some strange instrument moved to unexpected music by a touch in the dark. He saw her looking down the corridor, and swiftly around her, as if afraid of what lay in the shadows of the cells, afraid of the memories of old crimes which they held, and the lingering recollection of the men they had contained.“He’ll not do any harm, don’t be afraid,” said he.“No, I’m not,” she told him, drawing a little nearer, quite unconsciously, he knew, as she spoke. “I was thinking how dreadful it must be here for you, especially in the night. But it will not be for long,” she cheered him; “we know they’ll soon set you free.”“I suppose a person would think a guilty man would suffer more here than an innocent one,” said he, “but I don’t think that’s so. That man down there knows he’s going to be199sent to the penitentiary for stealing a horse, but he sings.”She was looking at him, a little cloud of perplexity in her eyes, as if there was something about him which she had not looked for and did not quite understand. She blushed when Joe turned toward her, slowly, and caught her eyes at their sounding.He was thinking over a problem new to him, also–the difference in women. There was Ollie, who marked a period in his life when he began to understand these things, dimly. Ollie was not like this one in any particular that he could discover as common between them. She was far back in the past today, like a simple lesson, hard in its hour, but conquered and put by. Here was one as far above Ollie as a star.Miss Price began to speak of books, reaching out with a delicate hesitancy, as if she feared that she might lead into waters too deep for him to follow. He quickly relieved her of all danger of embarrassment on that head by telling her of some books which he had not read, but wished to read, holding to the bars as he talked, looking wistfully toward the spot of sunlight which was now growing as slender as a golden cord against the gray wall. His eyes came back to her face, to find that look of growing wonder there, to see her quick blush mount and consume it in her eyes like a flame.“You’ve made more of the books that you’ve read than many of us with a hundred times more,” said she warmly. “I’ll be ashamed to mention books to you again.”“You oughtn’t say that,” said he, hanging his head in boyish confusion, feeling that same sense of shyness and desire to hide as came over him when his mother recounted his youthful campaign against the three books on the Newbolt shelf.“You remember what you get out of them,” she nodded gravely, “I don’t.”200“My father used to say that was one advantage in having a few,” said he.The colonel joined them then, the loud-spoken benediction of the horse-thief following him. There was a flush of indignation in his face and fire in his eyes.“I’ll expose the scoundrel; I’ll show him that he can’t rob both the county and the helpless men that misfortune throws into his hands!” the colonel declared.He gave his hand to Joe in his ceremonious fashion.“I’ve got some pressing business ahead of me with the sheriff,” he said, “and we’ll be going along. But I’ll manage to come over every few days and bring what cheer I can to you, Joe.”“Don’t put yourself out,” said Joe; “but I’ll be mighty glad to see you any time.”“This is only a cloud in your life, boy; it will pass, and leave your sky serene and bright,” the colonel cheered.“I’ll see how many of the books that you’ve named we have,” said Alice. “I’m afraid we haven’t them all.”“I’ll appreciate anything at all,” said Joe.He looked after her as far as his eyes could follow, and then he listened until her footsteps died, turning his head, checking his breath, as if holding his very life poised to catch the fading music of some exquisite strain.When she was quite out of hearing, he sighed, and marked an imaginary line upon the wall. Her head had reached to there, just on a level with a certain bolt. He measured himself against it to see where it struck in his own height. It was just a boy’s trick. He blushed when he found himself at it.He sat on his bedside and took up the Book. The humor for reading seemed to have passed away from him for then. But there was provender for thought, new thought, splendid and bright-colored. He felt that he had been associating,201for the first time in his life, with his own kind. He never had seen Alice Price before that day, for their lives had been separated by all that divides the eminent from the lowly, the rich from the poor, and seeing her had been a moving revelation. She had come into his troubled life and soothed it, marking a day never to be forgotten. He sat there thinking of her, the unopened book in his hand.How different she was from Ollie, the wild rose clambering unkept beside the hedge. She was so much more delicate in form and face than Ollie–Ollie, who–There was a sense of sacrilege in the thought. He must not name her with Ollie; he must not think of them in the measure of comparison. Even such juxtaposition was defiling for Alice. Ollie, the unclean!Joe got up and walked his cell. How uncouth he was, thought he, his trousers in his boot-tops, his coat spare upon his growing frame. He regarded himself with a feeling of shame. Up to that time he never had given his clothing any thought. As long as it covered him, it was sufficient. But it was different after seeing Alice. Alice! What a soothing name!Joe never knew what Colonel Price said to the sheriff; but after the little gleam of sun had faded out of his cell, and the gnawings of his stomach had become painfully acute, his keeper came down with a basket on his arm. He took from it a dinner of boiled cabbage and beef, such as a healthy man might lean upon with confidence, and the horse-thief came in for his share of it, also.When the sheriff came to Joe’s cell for the empty dishes, he seemed very solicitous for his comfort and welfare.“Need any more cover on your bed, or anything?”No, Joe thought there was enough cover; and he did not recall in his present satisfied state of stomach, that his cell lacked any other comfort that the sheriff could supply.202“Well, if you want anything, all you’ve got to do is holler,” said the sheriff in a friendly way.There is nothing equal to running for office to move the love of a man for his fellows, or to mellow his heart to magnanimous deeds.“Say,” called the horse-thief in voice softened by the vapors of his steaming dinner, “that friend of yours with the whiskers all over him is ace-high over here in this end of the dump! And say, friend, they could keep me here for life if they’d send purty girls like that one down here to see me once in a while. You’re in right, friend; you certainly air in right!”Colonel Price had kindled a fire in his library that night, for the first chill of frost was in the air. He sat in meditative pose, the newspaper spread wide and crumpling upon the floor beside him in his listlessly swinging hand. The light of the blazing logs was laughing in his glasses, and the soft gleam of the shaded lamp was on his hair.Books by the hundred were there in the shelves about him. Old books, brown in the dignity of age and service to generations of men; new books, tucked among them in bright colors, like transient blooms in the homely stability of garden soil. There was a long oak table, made of native lumber and finished in its natural color, smoke-brown from age, like the books; and there was Alice, like a nimble bee skimming the sweets of flowers, flitting here and there in this scholar’s sanctuary.Colonel Price looked up out of his meditation and followed her with a smile.“Have you found them all?” he asked.“I’ve found Milton andThe Lays of Ancient RomeandDon Quixote, but I can’t find theMeditations of Marcus Aurelius,” said she.203“Judge Maxwell has it,” he nodded; “he carried it away more than a month ago. It was the first time he ever met an English translation, he said. I must get it from him; he has a remarkably short memory for borrowed books.”Alice joined him in the laugh over the judge’s shortcoming.“He’s a regular old dear!” she said.“Ah, yes; if he was only forty years younger, Alice–if he was only forty years younger!” the colonel sighed.“I like him better the way he is,” said she.“Where did that boy ever hear tell of Marcus Aurelius?” he wondered.“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I don’t understand him, he seems so strange and deep. He’s not like a boy. You’d think, from talking with him, that he’d had university advantages.”“It’s blood,” said the colonel, with the proud swelling of a man who can boast that precious endowment himself, “you can’t keep it down. There’s no use talking to me about this equality between men at the hour of birth; it’s all a poetic fiction. It would take forty generations of this European scum such as is beginning to drift across to us and taint our national atmosphere to produce one Joe Newbolt! And he’s got blood on only one side, at that.“But the best in all the Newbolt generations that have gone before seem to be concentrated in that boy. He’ll come through this thing as bright as a new bullet, and he’ll make his mark in the world, too. Marcus Aurelius. Well, bless my soul!”“Is it good?” she asked, stacking the books which she had selected on the table, standing with her hand on them, looking down at her smiling father with serious face.“I wouldn’t say that it would be good for a young lady with forty beaus and unable to choose among them, or for a frivolous young thing with three dances a week––”204“Oh, never more than two at the very height of social dissipation in Shelbyville!” she laughed.He lifted a finger, imposing silence, and a laugh lurked in his eyes.“No, I’d not say that such a light-headed creature would find much fodder in the ruminations and speculations and wise conclusions of our respected friend, Marcus,” said he. “But a lad like Joe Newbolt, with a pair of eyes in his head like a prophet, will get a great deal of good, and even comfort, out of that book.”“We must get it from Judge Maxwell,” said she conclusively.“A strange lad, a strange lad,” reflected the colonel.“So tall and strong,” said she. “Why, from the way his mother spoke of him, I expected to see a little fellow with trousers up to his knees.”She sat at the table and began cutting the leaves of a new magazine.Colonel Price lifted his paper, smoothed the crumples out of it, adjusted the focus of his glasses, and resumed reading the county news. They seemed contented and happy there, alone, with their fire in the chimney. Fire itself is a companion. It is like youth in a room.There was between them a feeling of comradeship and understanding which seldom lives where youth stands on one hand, age on the other. Years ago Alice’s mother had gone beyond the storms and vexations of this life. Those two remaining of the little family had drawn together, closing up the space that her absence had made. There seemed no disparity of years, and their affection and fidelity had come to be a community pride.Alice was far from being the frivolous young thing that her father’s banter indicated. She had a train of admirers, never thinning from year to year, to be certain, for it had205been the regular fate of adolescent male Shelbyville to get itself tangled up in love with Alice Price ever since her high-school days. Many of the youngsters soon outgrew the affection; but it seemed to become a settled and permanent affliction in others, threatening to incapacitate them from happiness, according to their young view of it, and blast their ambitions in the face of the world.Every girl, to greater or less extent, has her courtiers of that kind. Nature has arranged this sort of tribute for the little queen-bees of humanity’s hives. And so there were other girls in Shelbyville who had their train of beaus, but there was none quite so popular or so much desired as Alice Price.Alice was considered the first beauty of the place. Added to this primary desirability was the fact that, in the fine gradations of pedigrees and the stringent exactions of blood which the patrician families of Shelbyville drew, Colonel Price and his daughter were the topmost plumes on the peacock of aristocracy. Other young ladies seemed to make all haste to assuage the pangs of at least one young man by marrying him, and to blunt the hopes of the rest by that decisive act. Not so Alice Price. She was frank and friendly, as eager for the laughter of life as any healthy young woman should be, but she gave the young men kindly counsel when they became insistent or boresome, and sent them away.Shelbyville was founded by Kentuckians; some of the old State’s best families were represented there. A person’s pedigree was his credentials in the society of the slumbering little town, nestled away among the blue hills of Missouri. It did not matter so much about one’s past, for blood will have its vagaries and outflingings of youthful spirit; and even less what the future promised, just so there was blood to vouch for him at the present.Blood had not done a great deal for Shelbyville, no matter what its excellencies in social and political life. The old town206stood just about as it was finished, sixty years and more before that time. Upstart cities had sprung up not far away, throwing Shelbyville into hopeless shadow. The entire energies of its pioneers seemed to have been expended in its foundation, leaving them too much exhausted to transmit any of their former fire and strength to their sons. It followed that the sons of Shelbyville were not what their fathers had been.Of course, there were exceptions where one of them rose once in a while and made a streak across the state or national firmament. Some of them were eminent in the grave professions; most of them were conductors of street cars in Kansas City, the nearest metropolis. There was not room in Shelbyville for all its sons to establish themselves at law, even if they had all been equipped, and if a man could not be a lawyer or a college professor, what was open to him, indeed, but conducting a street-car? That was a placid life.It is remarkable how Kentuckians can maintain the breed of their horses through many generations, but so frequently fall short in the standard of their sons. Kentuckians are only an instance. The same might be said of kings.Not understanding her exactions in the matter, nor her broader requirements, Shelbyville could not make out why Alice Price remained unmated. She was almost twenty, they said, which was coming very close to the age-limit in Shelbyville. It was nothing unusual for girls to marry there at seventeen, and become grandmothers at thirty-seven.If she wanted better blood than she could find in Shelbyville, the old gentlemen said, twisting their white old heads in argumentative finality, she’d have to go to the nobility of Europe. Even then she’d be running her chances, by Ned! They grew indignant when she refused to have their sons. They took it up with the colonel, they remonstrated, they went into pedigrees and offered to produce documents.207There was Shelley Bryant’s father, a fine, straight-backed old gentleman with beard as white as the plumage of a dove. His son was a small, red-faced, sandy-haired, pale-eyed chap with spaces between his big front teeth. He traded in horses, and sometimes made as much as fifteen dollars on a Saturday. His magnitude of glory and manly dignity as compared to his father’s was about that of a tin pan to the sun.When Alice refused Shelley, the old general–he had won the title in war, unlike Colonel Price–went to the colonel and laid the matter off with a good deal of emphasis and flourishing of his knotted black stick. If a woman demanded blood, said the general, where could she aspire above Shelley? And beyond blood, what was there to be considered when it came to marrying and breeding up a race of men?Champion that he was of blood and lineage, Colonel Price was nettled by the old gentleman’s presumptuous urging of his unlikely son’s cause.“I am of the opinion, sir,” Colonel Price replied, with a good bit of hauteur and heat, “that my daughter always has given, and always will give, the preference to brains!”General Bryant had not spoken to the colonel for two months after that, and his son Shelley had proved his superiority by going off to Kansas City and taking a job reading gas-meters.Colonel Price went to the mantel and filled his pipe from the tobacco-jar. He sat smoking for a little while, his paper on his knee.“The lad’s in deeper trouble, I’m afraid, than he understands,” said he at last, as if continuing his reflections aloud, “and it may take a bigger heave to pull him out than any of us think right now.”“Oh, I hope not,” said Alice, looking across at him suddenly, her eyes wide open with concern. “I understood that this was just a preliminary proceeding, a sort of formality208to conform to the legal requirements, and that he would be released when they brought him up before Judge Maxwell. At least, that was the impression that he gave me of the case himself.”“Joe is an unsophisticated and honest lad,” said the colonel. “There is something in the case that he refused to disclose or discuss before the coroner’s jury, they say. I don’t know what it is, but it’s in relation to the quarrel between him and Isom Chase which preceded the tragedy. He seems to raise a point of honor on it, or something. I heard them say this afternoon that it was nothing but the fear that it would disclose his motive for the crime. They say he was making off with old Chase’s money, but I don’t believe that.”“They’re wrong if they think that,” said she, shaking her head seriously, “he’d never do a thing like that.”“No, I don’t believe he would. But they found a bag of money in the room, old Chase had it clamped in the hook of his arm, they say.”“Well, I’m sure Joe Newbolt never had his hands on it, anyhow,” said she.“That’s right,” approved the colonel, nodding in slow thoughtfulness; “we must stand up for him, for his own sake as well as Peter’s. He’s worthy.”“And he’s innocent. Can’t you see that, father?”“As plain as daylight,” the colonel said.The colonel stretched out his legs toward the blaze, crossed his feet and smoked in comfort.“But I wonder what it can be that the boy’s holding back?”“He has a reason for it, whatever it is,” she declared.“That’s as certain as taxes,” said the colonel. “He’s a remarkable boy, considering the chances he’s had–bound out like a nigger slave, and beaten and starved, I’ll warrant. A remark-able lad; very, very. Don’t you think so, Alice?”209“I think he is, indeed,” said she.A long silence.A stick in the chimney burned in two, the heavy ends outside the dogs dropped down, the red brands pointing upward. The colonel put his hand to his beard and sat in meditation. The wind was rising. Now and then it sounded like a groan in the chimney-top. Gray ashes formed, frost-like, over the ardent coals. The silence between them held unbroken.Both sat, thought-wandering, looking into the fire....

The sheriff was a mild-mannered man, whose head was shaped like the end of a watermelon. His hair was close-cut and very thin at the top, due to the fact that all the nourishing substances both inside and outside his head, or any way appertaining thereto, went into the maintenance of the sheriff’s mustache, which was at least twice as large as Bill Frost’s.

This, of course, was as it should have been, for even the poorest kind of a sheriff is more than twice as important as the very best sort of constable. In those days it was the custom for sheriffs in that part of the country to train up these prodigious mustaches, perhaps in the belief that such adornments lent them the appearance of competence and valor, of which endowments nature had given them no other testimonial. In any event it is known that many a two-inch sheriff took his stand behind an eight-inch mustache, and walked boldly in the honor of his constituents.

The sheriff of Shelbyville was a type of this class, both in mental depth and facial adornment. He was exceedingly jealous of his power, and it was his belief that too many liberties permitted a prisoner, and too many favors shown, acted in contravention of the law’s intent as interpreted by the prosecuting attorney; namely, that a person under the cloud of accusation should be treated as guilty until able to prove himself innocent. Therefore the sheriff would not allow Joe Newbolt to leave his cell to meet visitors after his arraignment.

The meeting between the prisoner and his mother in the189office of the jail was to be the last of that sort; all who came in future must see him at the door of his cell. That was the rule laid down to Joe when he parted from his mother and Colonel Price that day.

As a cell in a prison-house, perhaps Joe’s place of confinement was fairly comfortable. It was situated in the basement of the old court-house, where there was at least light enough to contemplate one’s misery by, and sufficient air to set one longing for the fields. There was but one other prisoner, a horse-thief, waiting for trial.

This loquacious fellow, who was lodged directly across the corridor, took great pains to let Joe see the admiration and esteem in which he held him on account of the distinguished charge under which he was confined. He annoyed Joe to such extent that he asked the sheriff that evening to shift them about if possible.

“Well, I’ll move him if you say so, but I left him there because I thought he’d be company for you,” said the sheriff. “I don’t mind talkin’ in this jail when there’s no more than two in it.”

“I don’t want to talk,” said Joe.

So the horse-thief was removed to the farther end of the corridor, where he kept up a knocking on the bars of his cell during the early hours of the night, and then turned off his diversion by imitating the sound of a saw on steel, which he could do with his tongue against his teeth with such realism as to bring the sheriff down in his nightshirt, with a lantern in one hand and a shotgun in the other.

Joe’s second night in jail passed very much like the first, when they had brought him there all bewildered and dazed. There was a grated window in the wall above his reach, through which he could see the branches of an elm-tree, blowing bare of leaves; beyond that a bit of sky. Joe sat on the edge of his cot that second night a long time after the stars190came out, gazing up at the bar-broken bit of sky, reviewing the events leading up to his situation.

There was no resentment in him against the jury of his neighbors whose finding had sent him to jail under the cloud of that terrible accusation; he harbored no ill-feeling for the busy, prying little coroner, who had questioned him so impertinently. There was one person alone, in the whole world of men, to blame, and that was Curtis Morgan. He could not have been far away on the day of the inquest; news of the tragic outcome of Ollie’s attempt to join him must have traveled to his ears.

Yet he had not come forward to take the load of suspicion from Joe’s shoulders by confessing the treacherous thing that he had plotted. He need not have revealed the complete story of his trespass upon the honor of Isom Chase, thought Joe; he could have saved Ollie’s name before the neighbors; and yet relieved Joe of all suspicion. Now that Isom was dead, he could have married her. But Morgan had not come. He was a coward as well as a rascal. It was more than likely that, in fear of being found out, he had fled away.

And suppose that he never came back; suppose that Ollie should not elect to stand forth and explain the hidden part of that night’s tragedy? She could not be expected, within reason, to do this. Even the thought that she might weaken and do so was abhorrent to Joe. It was not a woman’s part to make a sacrifice like that; the world did not expect it of her. It rested with Morgan, the traitor to hospitality; Morgan, the ingratiating scoundrel, to come forward and set him free. Morgan alone could act honorably in that clouded case; but if he should elect to remain hidden and silent, who would be left to answer but Joe Newbolt?

And should he reveal the thing that would bring him liberty? Was freedom more precious than his honor, and the honor of a poor, shrinking, deluded woman?191

No. He was bound by a gentleman’s obligation; self-assumed, self-appointed. He could not tell.

But what a terrible situation, what an awful outlook for him in such event! They hung men for murder on the jail-yard gallows, with a knot of rope behind the left ear and a black cap over the face. And such a death left a stain upon the name that nothing would purify. It was an attainder upon generations unborn.

Joe walked his cell in the agony of his sudden and acute understanding of the desperate length to which this thing might carry him. Hammer had protested, with much show of certainty, that he would get him off without much difficulty. But perhaps Hammer was counting on him to reveal what he had kept to himself at the inquest. What should he do about that in his relations with Hammer? Should he tell him about Morgan, and have him set men on his track to drag him back and make him tell the truth? Granting that they found him, who was there to make him speak?

Could not Morgan and Ollie, to cover their own shame and blame, form a pact of silence or denial and turn back his good intentions in the form of condemnation upon his own head? How improbable and unworthy of belief his tale, with its reservations and evasions, would sound to a jury with Morgan and Ollie silent.

The fright of his situation made him feverish; he felt that he could tear at the walls with his hands, and scream, and scream until his heart would burst. He was unmanned there in the dark. He began to realize this finally after his frenzy had thrown him into a fever. He gave over his pacing of the little cell, and sat down again to reason and plan.

Hammer had made so much talk about the papers which he would get ready that Joe had been considerably impressed. He saw now that it would require something more than papers to make people understand that he had a gentleman’s reason,192and not a thief’s, for concealing what they had pressed him to reveal.

There was a woman first, and that was about all that Joe could make of the situation up to that time. She must be protected, even though unworthy. None knew of that taint upon her but himself and the fugitive author of it, but Joe could not bring himself to contemplate liberty bought at the price of her public degradation. This conclusion refreshed him, and dispelled the phantoms from his hot brain.

After the sounds of the town had fallen quiet, and the knocking of feet on the pavement along his prison wall had ceased, Joe slept. He woke steady, and himself again, long before he could see the sun, yellow on the boughs of the elm-tree.

The sheriff furnished him a piece of comb, and he smoothed his hair by guess, a desperate character, such as he was accounted by the officer, not being allowed the luxury of a mirror. One might lick the quicksilver from the back of a mirror, or open an artery with a fragment of it, or even pound the glass and swallow it. Almost anything was nicer than hanging, so the sheriff said.

Scant as the food had been at Isom’s until his revolt had forced a revision of the old man’s lifelong standard, Joe felt that morning after his second jail breakfast that he would have welcomed even a hog-jowl and beans. The sheriff was allowed but forty cents a day for the maintenance of each prisoner, and, counting out the twenty-five cents profit which he felt as a politician in good standing to be his due, the prisoners’ picking was very lean indeed.

That morning Joe’s breakfast had been corn-pone, cold, with no lubricant to ease it down the lane. There had been a certain squeamish liquid in addition, which gave off the smell of a burning straw-stack, served in a large tin cup. Joe had not tasted it, but his nose had told him that it was193“wheat coffee,” a brew which his mother had made sometimes in the old days of their darkest adversity.

Joe knew from the experience of the previous day that there would be nothing more offered to fortify the stomach until evening. The horse-thief called up from his end of the jail, asking Joe how he liked the fare.

Reserved as Joe was disposed to be toward him, he expressed himself somewhat fully on the subject of the sheriff’s cuisine. The horse-thief suggested a petition to the county court or a letter to the sheriff’s political opponent. He said that his experience in jails had been that a complaint on the food along about election time always brought good results. Joe was not interested in the matter to that extent. He told the fellow that he did not expect to be a permanent occupant of the jail.

“You think you’ll go down the river for a double-nine?” he asked.

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Joe.

“To the pen for life, kid; that’s what I mean.”

“I don’t know,” said Joe gloomily.

“Well, say, I tell you, if they give you the other,” said the friendly thief, lifting his naturally high voice to make it carry along the echoing passage, “you’ll git plenty to eat, and three times a day, too. When they put a feller in the death-cell they pass in the finest chuck in the land. You know, if a feller’s got a smart lawyer he can keep up that line of eatin’ for maybe two or three years by appealin’ his case and dodges like that.”

“I don’t want to talk,” said Joe.

“Oh, all right, kid,” said the thief flippantly. Then he rattled his grated door to draw Joe’s attention.

“But, ’y God, kid, the day’s comin’ to you when you will want to talk, and when you’d give the teeth out of your mouth, and nearly the eyes out of your head, for the sound194of a friendly human voice aimed at you. Let ’em take you off down the river to Jeff’ City and put you behind them tall walls once, where the best you hear’s a cuss from a guard, and where you march along with your hands on the shoulders of the man in front of you; and another one behind you does the same to you, and their eyes all down and their faces the color of corpses, andthenyou’ll know!

“You’ll hear them old fellers, them long-timers, whisperin’ in the night, talkin’ to theirselves, and it’ll sound to you like wind in the grass. And you’ll think of grass and trees and things like that on the outside, and you’ll feel like you want to ram your head ag’in’ the wall and yell. Maybe you’ll do it–plenty of ’em does–and then they’ll give you the water-cure, they’ll force it down you with a hose till you think you’ll bust. I tell you, kid, Iknow, ’y God! I’ve been there–but not for no double-nine like they’ll give you.”

The man’s voice seemed to be hanging and sounding yet in the corridor, even after he was silent, his cruel picture standing in distorted fancy before Joe’s eyes. Joe wiped the sweat from his forehead, breathing through his open mouth.

“Well, maybe they won’t, though,” said the fellow, resuming as if after considering it, “maybe they’ll give you the quick and painless, I don’t know.”

Joe had been standing at his cell door, drawn to listen to the lecture of his fellow prisoner, terrible, hopeless, as it sounded in his ears. Now he sat on his bedside again, feeling that this was indeed a true forecast of his own doom. The sun seemed already shut out from him in the morning of his day, the prison silence settling, never to be broken again in those shadows where shuffling men filed by, with eyes downcast and faces gray, like the faces of the dead.

Life without liberty would be a barren field, he knew; but liberty without honor would yield no sweeter fruit. And who was there in the world of honorable men to respect a coward195who had saved his own skin from the fire by stripping a frail woman’s back to the brand? A gentleman couldn’t do it, said Joe, at the end, coming back from his sweating race with fear to the starting-place, a good deal cooled, not a little ashamed.

Let them use him as they might; he would stand by his first position in the matter. He would have to keep on lying, as he had begun; but it would be repeating an honorable lie, and no man ever went to hell for that.

The sun was coming through the high cell window, broadening its oblique beam upon the wall. Looking up at it, Joe thought that it must be mid-morning. Now that his panic was past, his stomach began to make a gnawing and insistent demand for food. Many a heavy hour must march by, thought he, before the sheriff came with his beggarly portion. He felt that in case he should be called upon to endure imprisonment long he must fall away to a skeleton and die.

In his end of the corridor the horse-thief was still, and Joe was glad of it. No matter how earnestly he might come to desire the sound of a human voice in time, he did not want to hear the horse-thief’s then, nor any other that prophesied such disquieting things.

There was a barred gate across the corridor at the foot of the stairs which led up to the sheriff’s office. Joe’s heart jumped with the hope that it was his mother coming when he heard the key in the lock and voices at the grating.

“Right down there, to the right,” the sheriff was directing. “When you want to leave just come here and rattle the lock. I can’t take no chances bringin’ such desperate fellers as him up to the office, colonel. You can see that as well as me.”

What Colonel Price replied Joe could not hear, for his low-modulated voice of culture was like velvet beside a horse-blanket compared to the sheriff’s.196

“I’m over on this side, colonel, sir,” said Joe before he could see him.

And then the colonel stepped into the light which came through the cell window, bringing with him one who seemed as fair to Joe in that somber place as the bright creatures who stood before Jacob in Bethel that night he slept with his head upon a stone.

“This is my daughter,” said Colonel Price. “We called in to kind of cheer you up.”

She offered Joe her hand between the bars; his went forward to meet it gropingly, for it lacked the guidance of his eyes.

Joe was honey-bound, like an eager bee in the heart of some great golden flower, tangled and leashed in a thousand strands of her hair. The lone sunbeam of his prison had slipped beyond the lintel of his low door, as if it had timed its coming to welcome her, and now it lay like a hand in benediction above her brow.

Her hair was as brown as wild honey; a golden glint lay in it here and there under the sun, like the honeycomb. A smile kindled in her brown eyes as she looked at him, and ran out to the corners of them in little crinkles, then moved slowly upon her lips. Her face was quick with the eagerness of youth, and she was tall.

“I’m surely beholden to you, Miss Price, for this favor,” said Joe, lapsing into the Kentucky mode of speech, “and I’m ashamed to be caught in such a place as this.”

“You have nothing to be ashamed of,” said she; “we know you are innocent.”

“Thank you kindly, Miss Price,” said he with quaint, old courtesy that came to him from some cavalier of Cromwell’s day.

“I thought you’d better meet Alice,” explained the colonel, “and get acquainted with her, for young people have tastes197in common that old codgers like me have outgrown. She might see some way that I would overlook to make you more comfortable here during the time you will be obliged to wait.”

“Yes, sir,” said Joe, hearing the colonel’s voice, but not making much out of what he was saying.

He was thinking that out of the gloom of his late cogitations she had come, like hope hastening to refute the argument of the horse-thief. His case could not be so despairing with one like her believing in him. It was a matter beyond a person such as a horse-thief, of course. One of a finer nature could understand.

“Father spoke of some books,” she ventured; “if you will––”

Her voice was checked suddenly by a sound which rose out of the farther end of the corridor and made her start and clutch her father’s arm. Joe pressed his face against the bars and looked along at his fellow prisoner, who was dragging his tin cup over the bars of his cell door with rapid strokes.

When the thief saw that he had drawn the attention of the visitors, he thrust his arm out and beckoned to the colonel. “Mister, I want to ask you to do me a little turn of a favor,” he begged in a voice new to Joe, so full of anguish, so tremulous and weak. “I want you to carry out to the world and put in the papers the last message of a dyin’ man!”

“What’s the matter with you, you poor wretch?” asked the colonel, moved to pity.

“Don’t pay any attention to him,” advised Joe; “he’s only acting up. He’s as strong as I am. I think he wants to beg from you.”

The colonel turned away from him to resume his conference with Joe, and the horse-thief once more rattled his cup across the bars.

“That noise is very annoying,” said the colonel, turning198to the man tartly. “Stop it now, before I call the sheriff!”

“Friend, it’s a starvin’ man that’s appealin’ to you,” said the prisoner, “it’s a man that ain’t had a full meal in three weeks. Ask that gentleman what we git here, let him tell you what this here sheriff that’s up for election agin serves to us poor fellers. Corn dodger for breakfast, so cold you could keep fish on it, and as hard as the rocks in this wall! That’s what we git, and that’s all we git. Ask your friend.”

“Is he telling the truth?” asked the colonel, looking curiously at Joe.

“I’m afraid he is, colonel, sir.”

“I’ll talk to him,” said the colonel.

In a moment he was listening to the horse-thief’s earnest relation of the hardships which he had suffered in the Shelbyville jail, and Joe and Alice were standing face to face, with less than a yard’s space between them, but a barrier there as insuperable as an alp.

He wanted to say something to cause her to speak again, for her low voice was as wonderful to him as the sound of some strange instrument moved to unexpected music by a touch in the dark. He saw her looking down the corridor, and swiftly around her, as if afraid of what lay in the shadows of the cells, afraid of the memories of old crimes which they held, and the lingering recollection of the men they had contained.

“He’ll not do any harm, don’t be afraid,” said he.

“No, I’m not,” she told him, drawing a little nearer, quite unconsciously, he knew, as she spoke. “I was thinking how dreadful it must be here for you, especially in the night. But it will not be for long,” she cheered him; “we know they’ll soon set you free.”

“I suppose a person would think a guilty man would suffer more here than an innocent one,” said he, “but I don’t think that’s so. That man down there knows he’s going to be199sent to the penitentiary for stealing a horse, but he sings.”

She was looking at him, a little cloud of perplexity in her eyes, as if there was something about him which she had not looked for and did not quite understand. She blushed when Joe turned toward her, slowly, and caught her eyes at their sounding.

He was thinking over a problem new to him, also–the difference in women. There was Ollie, who marked a period in his life when he began to understand these things, dimly. Ollie was not like this one in any particular that he could discover as common between them. She was far back in the past today, like a simple lesson, hard in its hour, but conquered and put by. Here was one as far above Ollie as a star.

Miss Price began to speak of books, reaching out with a delicate hesitancy, as if she feared that she might lead into waters too deep for him to follow. He quickly relieved her of all danger of embarrassment on that head by telling her of some books which he had not read, but wished to read, holding to the bars as he talked, looking wistfully toward the spot of sunlight which was now growing as slender as a golden cord against the gray wall. His eyes came back to her face, to find that look of growing wonder there, to see her quick blush mount and consume it in her eyes like a flame.

“You’ve made more of the books that you’ve read than many of us with a hundred times more,” said she warmly. “I’ll be ashamed to mention books to you again.”

“You oughtn’t say that,” said he, hanging his head in boyish confusion, feeling that same sense of shyness and desire to hide as came over him when his mother recounted his youthful campaign against the three books on the Newbolt shelf.

“You remember what you get out of them,” she nodded gravely, “I don’t.”200

“My father used to say that was one advantage in having a few,” said he.

The colonel joined them then, the loud-spoken benediction of the horse-thief following him. There was a flush of indignation in his face and fire in his eyes.

“I’ll expose the scoundrel; I’ll show him that he can’t rob both the county and the helpless men that misfortune throws into his hands!” the colonel declared.

He gave his hand to Joe in his ceremonious fashion.

“I’ve got some pressing business ahead of me with the sheriff,” he said, “and we’ll be going along. But I’ll manage to come over every few days and bring what cheer I can to you, Joe.”

“Don’t put yourself out,” said Joe; “but I’ll be mighty glad to see you any time.”

“This is only a cloud in your life, boy; it will pass, and leave your sky serene and bright,” the colonel cheered.

“I’ll see how many of the books that you’ve named we have,” said Alice. “I’m afraid we haven’t them all.”

“I’ll appreciate anything at all,” said Joe.

He looked after her as far as his eyes could follow, and then he listened until her footsteps died, turning his head, checking his breath, as if holding his very life poised to catch the fading music of some exquisite strain.

When she was quite out of hearing, he sighed, and marked an imaginary line upon the wall. Her head had reached to there, just on a level with a certain bolt. He measured himself against it to see where it struck in his own height. It was just a boy’s trick. He blushed when he found himself at it.

He sat on his bedside and took up the Book. The humor for reading seemed to have passed away from him for then. But there was provender for thought, new thought, splendid and bright-colored. He felt that he had been associating,201for the first time in his life, with his own kind. He never had seen Alice Price before that day, for their lives had been separated by all that divides the eminent from the lowly, the rich from the poor, and seeing her had been a moving revelation. She had come into his troubled life and soothed it, marking a day never to be forgotten. He sat there thinking of her, the unopened book in his hand.

How different she was from Ollie, the wild rose clambering unkept beside the hedge. She was so much more delicate in form and face than Ollie–Ollie, who–There was a sense of sacrilege in the thought. He must not name her with Ollie; he must not think of them in the measure of comparison. Even such juxtaposition was defiling for Alice. Ollie, the unclean!

Joe got up and walked his cell. How uncouth he was, thought he, his trousers in his boot-tops, his coat spare upon his growing frame. He regarded himself with a feeling of shame. Up to that time he never had given his clothing any thought. As long as it covered him, it was sufficient. But it was different after seeing Alice. Alice! What a soothing name!

Joe never knew what Colonel Price said to the sheriff; but after the little gleam of sun had faded out of his cell, and the gnawings of his stomach had become painfully acute, his keeper came down with a basket on his arm. He took from it a dinner of boiled cabbage and beef, such as a healthy man might lean upon with confidence, and the horse-thief came in for his share of it, also.

When the sheriff came to Joe’s cell for the empty dishes, he seemed very solicitous for his comfort and welfare.

“Need any more cover on your bed, or anything?”

No, Joe thought there was enough cover; and he did not recall in his present satisfied state of stomach, that his cell lacked any other comfort that the sheriff could supply.202

“Well, if you want anything, all you’ve got to do is holler,” said the sheriff in a friendly way.

There is nothing equal to running for office to move the love of a man for his fellows, or to mellow his heart to magnanimous deeds.

“Say,” called the horse-thief in voice softened by the vapors of his steaming dinner, “that friend of yours with the whiskers all over him is ace-high over here in this end of the dump! And say, friend, they could keep me here for life if they’d send purty girls like that one down here to see me once in a while. You’re in right, friend; you certainly air in right!”

Colonel Price had kindled a fire in his library that night, for the first chill of frost was in the air. He sat in meditative pose, the newspaper spread wide and crumpling upon the floor beside him in his listlessly swinging hand. The light of the blazing logs was laughing in his glasses, and the soft gleam of the shaded lamp was on his hair.

Books by the hundred were there in the shelves about him. Old books, brown in the dignity of age and service to generations of men; new books, tucked among them in bright colors, like transient blooms in the homely stability of garden soil. There was a long oak table, made of native lumber and finished in its natural color, smoke-brown from age, like the books; and there was Alice, like a nimble bee skimming the sweets of flowers, flitting here and there in this scholar’s sanctuary.

Colonel Price looked up out of his meditation and followed her with a smile.

“Have you found them all?” he asked.

“I’ve found Milton andThe Lays of Ancient RomeandDon Quixote, but I can’t find theMeditations of Marcus Aurelius,” said she.203

“Judge Maxwell has it,” he nodded; “he carried it away more than a month ago. It was the first time he ever met an English translation, he said. I must get it from him; he has a remarkably short memory for borrowed books.”

Alice joined him in the laugh over the judge’s shortcoming.

“He’s a regular old dear!” she said.

“Ah, yes; if he was only forty years younger, Alice–if he was only forty years younger!” the colonel sighed.

“I like him better the way he is,” said she.

“Where did that boy ever hear tell of Marcus Aurelius?” he wondered.

“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I don’t understand him, he seems so strange and deep. He’s not like a boy. You’d think, from talking with him, that he’d had university advantages.”

“It’s blood,” said the colonel, with the proud swelling of a man who can boast that precious endowment himself, “you can’t keep it down. There’s no use talking to me about this equality between men at the hour of birth; it’s all a poetic fiction. It would take forty generations of this European scum such as is beginning to drift across to us and taint our national atmosphere to produce one Joe Newbolt! And he’s got blood on only one side, at that.

“But the best in all the Newbolt generations that have gone before seem to be concentrated in that boy. He’ll come through this thing as bright as a new bullet, and he’ll make his mark in the world, too. Marcus Aurelius. Well, bless my soul!”

“Is it good?” she asked, stacking the books which she had selected on the table, standing with her hand on them, looking down at her smiling father with serious face.

“I wouldn’t say that it would be good for a young lady with forty beaus and unable to choose among them, or for a frivolous young thing with three dances a week––”204

“Oh, never more than two at the very height of social dissipation in Shelbyville!” she laughed.

He lifted a finger, imposing silence, and a laugh lurked in his eyes.

“No, I’d not say that such a light-headed creature would find much fodder in the ruminations and speculations and wise conclusions of our respected friend, Marcus,” said he. “But a lad like Joe Newbolt, with a pair of eyes in his head like a prophet, will get a great deal of good, and even comfort, out of that book.”

“We must get it from Judge Maxwell,” said she conclusively.

“A strange lad, a strange lad,” reflected the colonel.

“So tall and strong,” said she. “Why, from the way his mother spoke of him, I expected to see a little fellow with trousers up to his knees.”

She sat at the table and began cutting the leaves of a new magazine.

Colonel Price lifted his paper, smoothed the crumples out of it, adjusted the focus of his glasses, and resumed reading the county news. They seemed contented and happy there, alone, with their fire in the chimney. Fire itself is a companion. It is like youth in a room.

There was between them a feeling of comradeship and understanding which seldom lives where youth stands on one hand, age on the other. Years ago Alice’s mother had gone beyond the storms and vexations of this life. Those two remaining of the little family had drawn together, closing up the space that her absence had made. There seemed no disparity of years, and their affection and fidelity had come to be a community pride.

Alice was far from being the frivolous young thing that her father’s banter indicated. She had a train of admirers, never thinning from year to year, to be certain, for it had205been the regular fate of adolescent male Shelbyville to get itself tangled up in love with Alice Price ever since her high-school days. Many of the youngsters soon outgrew the affection; but it seemed to become a settled and permanent affliction in others, threatening to incapacitate them from happiness, according to their young view of it, and blast their ambitions in the face of the world.

Every girl, to greater or less extent, has her courtiers of that kind. Nature has arranged this sort of tribute for the little queen-bees of humanity’s hives. And so there were other girls in Shelbyville who had their train of beaus, but there was none quite so popular or so much desired as Alice Price.

Alice was considered the first beauty of the place. Added to this primary desirability was the fact that, in the fine gradations of pedigrees and the stringent exactions of blood which the patrician families of Shelbyville drew, Colonel Price and his daughter were the topmost plumes on the peacock of aristocracy. Other young ladies seemed to make all haste to assuage the pangs of at least one young man by marrying him, and to blunt the hopes of the rest by that decisive act. Not so Alice Price. She was frank and friendly, as eager for the laughter of life as any healthy young woman should be, but she gave the young men kindly counsel when they became insistent or boresome, and sent them away.

Shelbyville was founded by Kentuckians; some of the old State’s best families were represented there. A person’s pedigree was his credentials in the society of the slumbering little town, nestled away among the blue hills of Missouri. It did not matter so much about one’s past, for blood will have its vagaries and outflingings of youthful spirit; and even less what the future promised, just so there was blood to vouch for him at the present.

Blood had not done a great deal for Shelbyville, no matter what its excellencies in social and political life. The old town206stood just about as it was finished, sixty years and more before that time. Upstart cities had sprung up not far away, throwing Shelbyville into hopeless shadow. The entire energies of its pioneers seemed to have been expended in its foundation, leaving them too much exhausted to transmit any of their former fire and strength to their sons. It followed that the sons of Shelbyville were not what their fathers had been.

Of course, there were exceptions where one of them rose once in a while and made a streak across the state or national firmament. Some of them were eminent in the grave professions; most of them were conductors of street cars in Kansas City, the nearest metropolis. There was not room in Shelbyville for all its sons to establish themselves at law, even if they had all been equipped, and if a man could not be a lawyer or a college professor, what was open to him, indeed, but conducting a street-car? That was a placid life.

It is remarkable how Kentuckians can maintain the breed of their horses through many generations, but so frequently fall short in the standard of their sons. Kentuckians are only an instance. The same might be said of kings.

Not understanding her exactions in the matter, nor her broader requirements, Shelbyville could not make out why Alice Price remained unmated. She was almost twenty, they said, which was coming very close to the age-limit in Shelbyville. It was nothing unusual for girls to marry there at seventeen, and become grandmothers at thirty-seven.

If she wanted better blood than she could find in Shelbyville, the old gentlemen said, twisting their white old heads in argumentative finality, she’d have to go to the nobility of Europe. Even then she’d be running her chances, by Ned! They grew indignant when she refused to have their sons. They took it up with the colonel, they remonstrated, they went into pedigrees and offered to produce documents.207

There was Shelley Bryant’s father, a fine, straight-backed old gentleman with beard as white as the plumage of a dove. His son was a small, red-faced, sandy-haired, pale-eyed chap with spaces between his big front teeth. He traded in horses, and sometimes made as much as fifteen dollars on a Saturday. His magnitude of glory and manly dignity as compared to his father’s was about that of a tin pan to the sun.

When Alice refused Shelley, the old general–he had won the title in war, unlike Colonel Price–went to the colonel and laid the matter off with a good deal of emphasis and flourishing of his knotted black stick. If a woman demanded blood, said the general, where could she aspire above Shelley? And beyond blood, what was there to be considered when it came to marrying and breeding up a race of men?

Champion that he was of blood and lineage, Colonel Price was nettled by the old gentleman’s presumptuous urging of his unlikely son’s cause.

“I am of the opinion, sir,” Colonel Price replied, with a good bit of hauteur and heat, “that my daughter always has given, and always will give, the preference to brains!”

General Bryant had not spoken to the colonel for two months after that, and his son Shelley had proved his superiority by going off to Kansas City and taking a job reading gas-meters.

Colonel Price went to the mantel and filled his pipe from the tobacco-jar. He sat smoking for a little while, his paper on his knee.

“The lad’s in deeper trouble, I’m afraid, than he understands,” said he at last, as if continuing his reflections aloud, “and it may take a bigger heave to pull him out than any of us think right now.”

“Oh, I hope not,” said Alice, looking across at him suddenly, her eyes wide open with concern. “I understood that this was just a preliminary proceeding, a sort of formality208to conform to the legal requirements, and that he would be released when they brought him up before Judge Maxwell. At least, that was the impression that he gave me of the case himself.”

“Joe is an unsophisticated and honest lad,” said the colonel. “There is something in the case that he refused to disclose or discuss before the coroner’s jury, they say. I don’t know what it is, but it’s in relation to the quarrel between him and Isom Chase which preceded the tragedy. He seems to raise a point of honor on it, or something. I heard them say this afternoon that it was nothing but the fear that it would disclose his motive for the crime. They say he was making off with old Chase’s money, but I don’t believe that.”

“They’re wrong if they think that,” said she, shaking her head seriously, “he’d never do a thing like that.”

“No, I don’t believe he would. But they found a bag of money in the room, old Chase had it clamped in the hook of his arm, they say.”

“Well, I’m sure Joe Newbolt never had his hands on it, anyhow,” said she.

“That’s right,” approved the colonel, nodding in slow thoughtfulness; “we must stand up for him, for his own sake as well as Peter’s. He’s worthy.”

“And he’s innocent. Can’t you see that, father?”

“As plain as daylight,” the colonel said.

The colonel stretched out his legs toward the blaze, crossed his feet and smoked in comfort.

“But I wonder what it can be that the boy’s holding back?”

“He has a reason for it, whatever it is,” she declared.

“That’s as certain as taxes,” said the colonel. “He’s a remarkable boy, considering the chances he’s had–bound out like a nigger slave, and beaten and starved, I’ll warrant. A remark-able lad; very, very. Don’t you think so, Alice?”209

“I think he is, indeed,” said she.

A long silence.

A stick in the chimney burned in two, the heavy ends outside the dogs dropped down, the red brands pointing upward. The colonel put his hand to his beard and sat in meditation. The wind was rising. Now and then it sounded like a groan in the chimney-top. Gray ashes formed, frost-like, over the ardent coals. The silence between them held unbroken.

Both sat, thought-wandering, looking into the fire....

210CHAPTER XIIIUNTIL THE DAY BREAK

Although Isom Chase had been in his grave a week, and Judge Little had been cracking his coat-tails over the road between his home and the county-seat daily, the matter of the will and the administration of the estate remained as in the beginning.Judge Little had filed the will for probate, and had made application for letters of administration, which the court had denied. Under the terms of the will, it was pointed out, he was empowered to act in that capacity only in case of the testator’s death before the majority of the legatee. The date of the document proved that the heir was now long past his majority, and the only interest that remained to Judge Little in the matter seemed to be the discovery of the testator’s unknown, unseen, and unbelieved-in son.If Isom ever had fathered a son, indeed, and the child had died in infancy, the fact had slipped the recollection of the oldest settler. Perhaps the proof of that mysterious matter lay in the hands of the two witnesses to Isom’s will. They should know, if anybody knew, people said.One of these witnesses, Thomas Cogshawl, had died long since, and there remained behind neither trace nor remembrance of him save a leaning, yellowed tombstone carrying the record of his achievements in this world. They were succinctly recounted in two words: Born and Died. His descendants were scattered, his family dispersed.The other witness, John Owens, was in the county poorhouse, deaf, dumb, and blind, his children dead, his money211gone. Communication with him, except by prods and thumps, had been out of the question for ten years and more.On the advice of her neighbors, Ollie had engaged a lawyer to guard her interests, and make a fight in the courts, if it came to that, in an effort to retain the property. It was a shame, said the neighbors; Isom never had a son, or, if he did have one, he had no business to do any such surreptitious fathering.While they denounced Isom, Judge Little was advertising in the metropolitan papers for the mysterious legatee, for there is no man so faithful to his trust as the administrator of another’s estate. Although the property had not yet succeeded to his hands, the judge was proceeding in confidence. If the existence of Isom Chase’s son could not be proved, neither could it be disproved.And there stood the will in Isom’s writing as plain as cow tracks, naming him as administrator. It would all work into his hands at the end, and there were rewards and emoluments for an administrator who understood his business, in that estate.That is true in the case of any executor in the affairs of dead men, or receiver in the muddled business of the living. That accounts for such men’s inflexibility in carrying out the provisions of unfeeling testators and the decrees of heartless courts. The law must be applied to the letter, the wishes of the deceased fulfilled to the last hateful particular, for the longer the administrator or receiver is in place, the longer flows the soothing stream of fees.Ollie had passed out of the brief tranquillity which had settled on her after the inquest and funeral. Worry had overtaken her again, and a longing for the return of Morgan, which seemed destined never to be quieted.There was not so much concern for her in the ultimate disposal of Isom’s estate, for she had consoled herself all212along, since the discovery of the will, that she would soon be above the need of his miserly scrapings and hoarded revenues of stint. Morgan would come, triumphant in his red-wheeled buggy, and bear her away to the sweet recompense of love, and the quick noises of life beyond that drowsy place. For Morgan, and love, she could give it all over without one regret, or a glance behind.Yet, with the thought of what she already had given for Morgan and love a quick catching of pain, a troubled stirring bordering on panic, rose in her breast. Where was Morgan, why did he remain away when he might come boldly now, like a man, and claim his own? What if Morgan never should come back? What if she should find herself a double widow, bereft of both the living and the dead?During her days she watched for him, straining her eyes up and down the dust-white road. At night her cheek burned upon her pillow, and her tears ran down, yearning for the man who had her heart’s love in his keeping and seemed unworthy of the trust.At such times her anger would flame hot against Joe. If he had not come into her affairs and muddled them, like a calf in a kitchen, all of this uncertainty and longing would have been spared her. And it would be like the fool now, the miserable, bleating bull-calf, to turn back on his word and betray her. In that case, what should she do? Bow her head, meekly, and bear him out? She did not think so. There was little chance that anybody would credit Joe if he should turn now on his own evidence, less if she should maintain that his first version of the tragedy was true. For what he had done by his impertinent meddling between her and Morgan he deserved to suffer. He must grin and bear it now, said she.Besides this feeling of revenge on Joe’s luckless head, Ollie had her reasons of selfishness and security for desiring him213out of the way. With him in prison for a long time–people said it would be for life–the secret of her indiscretion with Morgan would be safe. And then, if Morgan never came back, perhaps another.But she recoiled from the thought that they might hang Joe for the murder of Isom. She did not want him hung, for through her gathering cloud of blame for his too faithful guardianship of his master’s house, she had gleams of tenderness and gratitude for him. She could not help comparing him with Morgan in such moments of softness. Morgan had let that boy drive him away; he seemed to have gone with such a terror of him that he never had looked back. Joe, on the other hand, had stood by her through the storm. No, she did not want them to hang Joe, but it would be quite easy and comfortable with him out of the way for a long, long time.Public opinion was framing toward giving her the relief that she desired. If anybody suspected that Ollie was concerned in her husband’s death, it was some remote person whose opinion did not affect the public mind. The current belief was that Joe alone was to blame.No matter how severe the world may be upon a woman after she is down in the mire, there is no denying that it is reluctant to tumble her from her eminence and throw her there. A woman will find more champions than detractors in the face of the most serious charge; especially a young and pretty one, or one whose life has been such as to shape sympathy for her in itself.All her neighbors knew that Isom’s wife had suffered. That year of penance in her life brought Ollie before them in a situation which was an argument and plea for their sympathy and support.In spite, then, of the coroner’s attempt at the inquest to drag Ollie into the tragedy, and to give foundation for his214shrewd suspicion that there had been something between Isom’s wife and bondman which the husband was unaware of, no sensation nor scandal had come of that. The case was widely talked of, and it was the hope of every voter in the county that he would be drawn on the jury to try the boy accused of the murder. Even the busiest farmers began to plan their affairs so they would have at least one day to spare to attend the trial at its most interesting point.The date set for the trial was approaching, and so was election day. The prosecuting attorney, being up for reelection, hadn’t time, at that busy hour, to try a homicide case. He had to make speeches, and bestir himself to save his valuable services to the state. The man penned in jail, growing thin of cheek and lank of limb, could wait. There would be other homicide cases, but there never would be another prosecuting attorney so valuable as that one offering himself, and his young ambitions, on the altar of public service. That was according to his view. So he notified Hammer that the state would not be ready for trial on the day set.This pleased Hammer well enough, for the greater the delay the wider the notoriety of the case would spread, the larger his audience would be. By mutual agreement, the case was put over for one month.Joe protested against this delay in vain. Hammer said that they would profit by it, as the ferment of the public mind would settle meantime, and prejudice would not be so sharp. He talked a great deal about “character witnesses,” which Joe couldn’t see the need of, and took down the names of all the people whom Joe could name as having known him all his life. Then Hammer went his way, to make speeches in the campaign in support of the worthy sheriff.So Joe found himself with another month ahead of him before he could even hope to walk out into the sun again.215Jail was wearing on him. The disgrace of it was torture to his sensitive mind, without the physical chafing to pull him down to bones. Those two weeks had taken off his frame a great deal of the flesh that he had gained during the summer. His gauntness was more pronounced than it ever had been before.Mrs. Newbolt walked in twice a week to see him, carrying with her a basket of biscuits and other homely things dear to her son’s palate. All of which the sheriff speared with knitting-needles, and tried on various domestic animals, to make certain that the Widow Newbolt did not cheat the gallows out of its due by concealing saws in pies, or introducing poison to her hopeless offspring in boiled eggs.But all of her tempting relishes, or such of them, at least, as reached Joe, were powerless to fill his hollow cheeks, growing thinner and paler day by day. He could not eat with relish, he could not sleep with peace. If it had not been for the new light that Alice Price had brought into his life, he must have burned his young heart to ashes in his restiveness.Twice again the colonel and Alice had visited Joe, once to carry to him the books for which he had expressed a desire, and again to bring theMeditations of Marcus Aurelius, which Alice herself had gone after to Judge Maxwell’s house. Each time Joe fancied that she left a radiance behind her that brightened and warmed his cell for days.Nobody else in the town troubled himself about the prisoner’s welfare, for nobody else knew him. Two of the ministers had called at the jail in the first days of Joe’s incarceration, in a sort of urging-to-penitence state of mind, just as if they were assured of Joe’s guilt by reason of his very obscurity. Joe had told them that he had a religion of his own which seemed to fill all present needs, and did not want to make any change. He was respectful, but lofty in his216bearing. So they put him down as a stiff-necked son of Belial, and went away, leaving him to save himself if he thought he was equal to the task, in a manner of challenge.In the face of this clerical abandonment, people wondered over the deep interest that Colonel Price and his daughter seemed to have in the Widow Newbolt’s son, who had neither pride of family nor of possessions to recommend him.Joe had not yet brought himself to the belief that it was necessary to take his lawyer into his confidence, although Hammer had made it unfeelingly plain to him that the withholding of any vital fact would be fatal to his cause. Although Joe was beginning to experience a deep and disquieting concern about the outcome of the trial, he was disposed to give Morgan an honest man’s chance to come forward and take his share of it upon himself. If he should do that, then Joe felt that he would be morally free to disclose all that took place in the kitchen on the night Isom lost his life.In case that Morgan did not come, or that he had gone beyond the reach of Hammer or anybody else to fetch him back, then there would not be one word of evidence to uphold him, or justify his seemingly ridiculous stand of reticence. Yet, perhaps Morgan was waiting until the trial day; perhaps he knew all about it, and would appear in time. So argued Joe, in his great desire to be just to everybody.He reviewed the matter in this wise with ceaseless repetition, always arriving at this same end, from which he drew the comfort of hope. Perhaps Morgan would come in time. At any event, he would wait until the last minute of the last hour, and give him a man’s chance to do what was honorable and fair.The talkative horse-thief had been tried and condemned, and had gone his cheerful way to the penitentiary to serve three years. Before leaving he had taken pains to sound again his forecast of what was waiting Joe “down the river,”217in case they did not give him the “quick and painless.” He never had forgiven Joe his unwillingness to gossip with him in jail. The fellow’s vindictiveness was evident in the sneering delight that he took on his last night in jail in calling Joe out of his sleep, or pretended sleep, to hear his description of the terrors waiting a man condemned to prison for life.Now that he was gone, Joe felt that his words lived after him, like mold upon the walls, or a chilling damp between the stones. The recollection of them could not be denied his abnormally sharpened senses, nor the undoubted truth of their terrifying picture shut out of his imagination by any door of reasoning that he had the strength to close. Condemnation to prison would mean the suspension of all his young hopes and healthy desires; it would bring him to the end of his activities in the world as suddenly as death. Considering ambition, love, happiness, men in prison were already dead. They lived only in their faculty for suffering.Would Morgan come to save him from that fate? That was his sole speculation upon a solution of his pressing trouble. Without Morgan, Joe did not consider any other way.Colonel Price had received lately a commission for a corn picture from a St. Louis hotel, upon which he was working without pause. He had reached that state of exalted certainty in relation to corn that he never was obliged to put aside his colors and wait the charge of inspiration. His inspirational tide always was setting in when corn was the subject. Work with the colonel in such case was a matter of daylight.On account of the order, the colonel had no time for Joe, for art with him, especially corn art, was above the worries and concerns of all men. He did not forget the prisoner in the white heat of his commission. For several days he had it in his mind to ask Alice to visit him, and carry to him the assurance of the continuance of the family interest218and regard. But it was an unconventional thing to request of a young lady; a week slipped past before the colonel realized it while he temporized in his mind.At last he approached it circuitously and with a great deal of diplomatic concealment of his purpose, leaving ample room for retreat without unmasking his intention, in case he should discern indications of unwillingness.By that time the election was over and the country regularly insured against anarchy, devastation, and ruin for two years longer. The prosecuting attorney and the sheriff had been reelected; the machinery of the law was ready to turn at the grist.The colonel was pleased to see that Alice seconded him in his admission that they had been treating Joe Newbolt shamefully. Of course the sheriff was partly to blame for that, having set himself up with metropolitan importance, now that he was secure in office. He had put aside Wednesday as the one day of the week on which visitors, other than relatives or counsel of prisoners, would be permitted to enter the jail.It chanced to be a Wednesday morning when the colonel got around to it finally, and they agreed heartily and warmly that somebody ought to go and carry a little gleam of cheer and encouragement to Joe. The colonel looked at his unfinished picture, then at the mellow light of the autumn day, so much like the soul of corn itself, and then at Alice. He lifted his eyebrows and waved his hands in a gesture of helplessness.“Never mind,” said she; “you go ahead with the picture; I’ll go alone.”The colonel blessed her, and turned to his picture with a great sigh of relief. Alice left him to prepare for her visit, a flutter of eagerness in her heart, a feeling of timid nervousness which was unaccountable and strange.219She was not accustomed to trembling at the thought of meeting young men. Usually she went forward to the ordeal with a smile, which the victim would not have gathered a great deal of pleasure from, in most cases, if he had been able to read, for he would have seen her appraisement of him on her lips. There was none of this amusing measurement of Joe, no sounding of his shallows with her quick perception like a sunbeam finding the pebbles in the bottom of a brook. There was something in his presence which seemed like a cool wind on the forehead, palpable, yet profound from the mystery of its source.She had been surprised by the depth of this unpromising subject, to whom she had turned at first out of pity for his mother. The latent beauties of his rugged mind, full of the stately poetry of the old Hebrew chronicles, had begun to unfold to her sympathetic perception in the three visits she had made in her father’s company. Each visit had brought some new wonder from that crude storehouse of his mind, where Joe had been hoarding quaint treasures all his lonely, companionless years.And Joe, even in his confinement, felt that he was free in a larger sense than he ever had been before. He was shaking out his wings and beginning to live understandingly and understood. It was beyond him to believe it sometimes; beyond him always to grasp the reality of Alice Price, and her friendship for one so near the dust as he.What was there about the poor folks’ boy, bound out but yesterday to Isom Chase, and still bound to his estate under the terms of his articles? What was there in him to reach out and touch the sympathies of this beautiful young woman, who came to him with the scent of violets in her hair? Others had despised him for his poverty, and fastened a name upon him which was in itself a reproach. And still misunderstanding, they had carried him off to prison, charged with a dark220and hideous crime. Now this light had come to him in his despair, like the beam of that white star above the Judean plains. Like that star, she would stand far off to guide him, and exalt his soul by its strivings to attain her level. There their relations must cease. He might yearn his heart away in the gulf that lay between them, and stretch out his empty hands for evermore, never to feel its nearer warmth upon his breast. He was the poor folks’ boy.There was a wan sun on the day she came alone to the jail, a day so long remembered by Joe and held by him so dear. A solemn wind was roaming the tree-tops outside his cell window; the branches stood bleak and bare against the mottled sky.Alice wore a dress of some soft gray material, which seemed to embrace her in warm comfort, and reveal her in a new and sprightly loveliness. Her rippled hair was free upon her temples, her ear peeped out from beneath it with a roguish tint upon it, as if it waited to be kissed, and blushed for its own temerity. A gay little highland bonnet rode the brown billows of her abundant hair, saucy and bold as a corsair, with one bright little feather at its prow. Perhaps it was no more than a goose quill, or a cock’s plume dipped in dye, but to Joe it seemed as glorious as if it had been plucked from the fairest wing in the gardens of paradise.The marvel of it came over Joe again as he stood close against the bars to greet her. She, so rare and fine, so genteel and fair, caring enough for him and his unpromising fate to put aside the joyous business of her unhampered life and seek him in that melancholy place. It seemed a dream, yet she was there, her delicate dark brows lifted questioningly, as if uncertain that he would approve her unconventional adventure, a smile in the depths of her serene, frank eyes. Her cheeks were glowing from the sparks of morning, and her ungloved hand was reaching out to meet him.221He clasped it, and welcomed her with joy that he could not have simulated any more than he could have hidden. There was a tremor in his voice; a hot sweep of blood flamed in his face like a confession of his secret soul.“I never saw you look so tall,” said he slowly, measuring her with adoring eyes.“Maybe it’s the dress,” said she, looking herself over with a little expressive sweep of the hands, as if to put all the blame on that innocent nun-gray gown, if there was blame to be borne.She wore a little bunch of mignonette upon her breast, just at the point where the slashing of her bodice ended, and the gray gave way to a wedge of virginal white, as if her sempstress had started to lay bare her heart. The flowers quivered as from some internal agitation, nestling their pale gold spikes against their lovely bed.“I don’t know that it’s the dress,” said he, “but you do look taller than usual, it seems to me.”She laughed, as if she found humor in his solemn repetition of such a trivial discovery.“Well, I can’t help being tall,” she said. “How tall would you have a lady grow? How tall do you think one ought to be?”“‘As high as my heart,’” said Joe, rememberingOrlando’swords.The color deepened in her cheeks; she caught her breath with a little “Oh!”She wondered what sprout of blue-blooded and true-blooded nobility in Shelbyville there was capable of turning a reply like that without straining for it more than that pale cavalier with his worn clothing hanging loose upon his bony frame. When she ventured to lift her eyes to his face, she found him grasping a bar of the cell door with one hand, as if he would tear it from its frame. His gaze was fixed upon the high222window, he did not turn. She felt that he was struggling with himself that moment, but whether to drive to speech or to withhold it, she could not tell.“I wish I could go out there and run about five miles this morning,” he sighed.She gave him sigh for sigh, feeling that something was lost. He had not striven with himself merely to say that. But from there they went on to talk of his coming trial, and to expose the mutual hope that no further excuse would be advanced for its continuance. He seemed to be certain that the trial would see an end of his difficulty, and she trembled to contemplate any other outcome.So they stood and talked, and her face was glowing and her eyes were bright.“Your cheeks are as red as bitter-sweet,” said he.“There was frost last night,” she laughed, “and the cool wind makes my face burn.”“I know just how it feels,” said he, looking again toward the window with pathetic wistfulness, the hunger of old longings in his eyes.“It will not be long now until you are free,” she said in low voice of sympathy.He was still looking at the brown branches of the bare elm, now palely touched with the cloud-filtered autumn sun.“I know where there’s lots of it,” said he, as if to himself, “out in the hills. It loves to ramble over scrub-oak in the open places where there’s plenty of sun. I used to pick armloads of it the last year I went to school and carry it to the teacher. She liked to decorate the room with it.”He turned to her with apologetic appeal, as if to excuse himself for having wandered away from her in his thoughts.“I put it over the mantel,” she nodded; “it lasts all winter.”“The wahoo’s red now, too,” said he. “Do you care for it?”223“It doesn’t last as long as bitter-sweet,” said she.“Bitter-sweet,” said he reflectively, looking down into the shadows which hung to the flagstones of the floor. Then he raised his eyes to hers and surprised them brimming with tears, for her heart was aching for him in a reflection of his own lonely pain.“It is emblematic of life,” said he, reaching his hand out through the bars to her, as if to beg her not to grieve over the clouds of a day; “you know there are lots of comparisons and verses and sayings about it in that relation. It seems to me that I’ve always had more of the bitter than the sweet–but it will all come out right in time.”She touched his hand.“Do you like mignonette?” she asked. “I’ve brought you some.”“I love it!” said he with boyish impetuosity. “I had a bed of it last–no, I mean the summer before last–before I was–before I went to work for Isom.”She took the flowers from her bosom and placed them in his hand. The scent of them was in his nostrils, stirring memories of his old days of simple poverty, of days in the free fields. Again he turned his face toward the window, the little flowers clutched in his hand. His breast heaved as if he fought in the deep waters of his soul against some ignoble weakness.She moved a little nearer, and reached timidly through the bars with the breathless quiet of one who offers a caress to a sleeper. Her finger-tips touched his arm.“Joe,” said she, as if appealing in pity to him for permission to share his agony.He lifted the flowers to his lips and kissed the stems where her hand had clasped them; then bowed his head, his strong shoulders against the bars.“Joe!” Her voice was a whisper in his ear, more than224pity in it, so it seemed to him in the revelation of that moment; more than entreaty, more than consolation.Her hand was on his arm; he turned to her, shaking the fallen locks of his wild hair back from his brow. Then her hand was in his, and there was a warm mist, as of summer clouds, before his eyes. Her face was before him, and near–so near. Not red like the bitter-sweet, but pale as the winter dawn. Her eyes were wide, her chin was lifted, and he was straining her to him with the jail door bars against his breast.Love comes that way, and death; and the blow of sorrow; and the wrench of life’s last bitter pang. Only life is slow; tedious and laggard with its burdens and its gleams.He remembered in a moment; the pressure of the bars against his breast recalled him to his sad estate. He released her hand and fell back a step from her, a sharp cry on his lips as if he had seen her crushed and mangled just beyond his reach.“I didn’t mean to do that, Alice; I didn’t mean to do that!” said he, dropping to his knees before her as if struck down by a stunning blow. He bowed his head in contrite humiliation.“I forgot where I was, Alice; I forgot!”There was no displeasure in her face as she stood panting before the barred door, her hands to her heaving breast, her head thrown back. Her lips were parted; there was a light of exaltation in her eyes, as of one who has felt the benediction of a great and lasting joy. She put her hand through the bars again, and touched his bowed head.“Don’t do that, Joe,” said she.The sheriff’s key sounded in the lock of the corridor gate.“Time’s up,” he called.“All right; I’m coming,” Alice returned.Joe stood, weak and trembling. He felt as if he had, in225the heat of some great passion, rashly risked life, and more than life; that he had only now dragged his battered body back to the narrow, precarious ledge from which he had leaped, and that safety was not his.“I must go now,” said she, soft and low and in steady voice. “Good-bye.”She gave him her hand, and he clung to it like a nestling fastening upon the last branch interposing between it and destruction.“I forgot where I was,” said he weakly, his shaken mind incapable of comprehending things as they were, his abasement over the breach that he had committed being so profound. She withdrew her hand. When it was gone out of his, he remembered how warm it was with the tide of her young body, and how soft for his own work-roughened fingers to meet and enfold.“I must go now,” said she again. Her feet sounded in the corridor as she ran away. A little way along she stopped. She was beyond his sight, but her voice sounded near him when she called back “Good-bye!”She had not gone in anger nor displeasure, thought he, getting hand of his confused senses after a while, standing as she had left him, the flowers in his hand. Strangely exulting, strangely thrilling, mounting a moment like an eagle, plunging down now like a stone, Joe walked his cell.What had he done, drawn on by that which he had read in her eyes in that poignant moment! In jail, locked behind a grated door of steel, he had taken her hand and drawn her to him until the shock of the bars had called back his manhood. He had taken advantage of her friendship and sympathy.Prison was no place for love; a man locked in jail charged with a crime had no right to think of it. It was base of him, and unworthy. Still–mounting again in a swift, delicious226flight–it was sweet to know what her eyes had told him, sweeter to rest assured that she had not left him in scorn. Down again, a falling clod. Unless he had misinterpreted them in the ignorance of his untutored heart. Yet, that is a language that needs no lexicon, he knew.Who is so simple, indeed, as to be unaware of that? How different this passion from that which Ollie’s uncovered bosom had stirred; how he burned with shame at the memory of that day!Up and down he strode the morning through, his long, thin legs now spare in his boot-tops, his wide, bony shoulders sharp through his coat. The strong light fell on his gaunt face as he turned toward the window; shadows magnified its hollows when he turned toward the door. Now that the panic of it had left him, the sweetness of it remained.How soft her hand was, how her yielding body swayed in his arm! How delicious her breath was on his face; how near her eyes, speaking to him, and her lips; how near her parted, warm, red lips!He took up the Book, and turned with trembling hands to a place that he remembered well. There was something that he had read, not feeling, not understanding, words of which came back to him now. The Songs of Songs, Which is Solomon’s.Ah, the Song of Songs! The music of it now was written in his heart. It was not the song in glorification and exaltation of the church that the translators had captioned it; not a song full of earthly symbols meant to represent spiritual passions. Joe had read it, time and again, in that application, and it had fallen flavorless upon his understanding. No; it was the song of a strong man to the woman whom he loved.And the music of it, old but ever new in its human appeal, now was written in his heart.227Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely. Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.... Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved....Ah, until the day break!In his rapt exaltation the boy’s face beamed as he strode swiftly the length of his cell. It would not be long until daybreak now. The judge would understand him, and would not press a man to tell what he had delicate reasons for concealing, when the concealment could bring harm to nobody, but boundless good to one weak creature who must wither otherwise in the blaze of shame.He remembered the strong face and the long iron-gray hair of Judge Maxwell; only a little while ago Joe had given him some apples which he had stopped to admire as he drove past Isom’s orchard in his sagging, mud-splashed, old buggy. He was a good man; the uprightness of his life spoke from his face. Judge Maxwell was a man to understand.Poor Ollie; poor weak, shrinking Ollie! Her frightened eyes glowed hot in his memory of the day of the inquest, carrying to him their appeal. Poor, mistaken, unguided Ollie! He would protect her to the last, as he had done at the beginning, and trust and hope that the judge, and Alice, and the colonel, and the whole world, would understand in due and proper time.

Although Isom Chase had been in his grave a week, and Judge Little had been cracking his coat-tails over the road between his home and the county-seat daily, the matter of the will and the administration of the estate remained as in the beginning.

Judge Little had filed the will for probate, and had made application for letters of administration, which the court had denied. Under the terms of the will, it was pointed out, he was empowered to act in that capacity only in case of the testator’s death before the majority of the legatee. The date of the document proved that the heir was now long past his majority, and the only interest that remained to Judge Little in the matter seemed to be the discovery of the testator’s unknown, unseen, and unbelieved-in son.

If Isom ever had fathered a son, indeed, and the child had died in infancy, the fact had slipped the recollection of the oldest settler. Perhaps the proof of that mysterious matter lay in the hands of the two witnesses to Isom’s will. They should know, if anybody knew, people said.

One of these witnesses, Thomas Cogshawl, had died long since, and there remained behind neither trace nor remembrance of him save a leaning, yellowed tombstone carrying the record of his achievements in this world. They were succinctly recounted in two words: Born and Died. His descendants were scattered, his family dispersed.

The other witness, John Owens, was in the county poorhouse, deaf, dumb, and blind, his children dead, his money211gone. Communication with him, except by prods and thumps, had been out of the question for ten years and more.

On the advice of her neighbors, Ollie had engaged a lawyer to guard her interests, and make a fight in the courts, if it came to that, in an effort to retain the property. It was a shame, said the neighbors; Isom never had a son, or, if he did have one, he had no business to do any such surreptitious fathering.

While they denounced Isom, Judge Little was advertising in the metropolitan papers for the mysterious legatee, for there is no man so faithful to his trust as the administrator of another’s estate. Although the property had not yet succeeded to his hands, the judge was proceeding in confidence. If the existence of Isom Chase’s son could not be proved, neither could it be disproved.

And there stood the will in Isom’s writing as plain as cow tracks, naming him as administrator. It would all work into his hands at the end, and there were rewards and emoluments for an administrator who understood his business, in that estate.

That is true in the case of any executor in the affairs of dead men, or receiver in the muddled business of the living. That accounts for such men’s inflexibility in carrying out the provisions of unfeeling testators and the decrees of heartless courts. The law must be applied to the letter, the wishes of the deceased fulfilled to the last hateful particular, for the longer the administrator or receiver is in place, the longer flows the soothing stream of fees.

Ollie had passed out of the brief tranquillity which had settled on her after the inquest and funeral. Worry had overtaken her again, and a longing for the return of Morgan, which seemed destined never to be quieted.

There was not so much concern for her in the ultimate disposal of Isom’s estate, for she had consoled herself all212along, since the discovery of the will, that she would soon be above the need of his miserly scrapings and hoarded revenues of stint. Morgan would come, triumphant in his red-wheeled buggy, and bear her away to the sweet recompense of love, and the quick noises of life beyond that drowsy place. For Morgan, and love, she could give it all over without one regret, or a glance behind.

Yet, with the thought of what she already had given for Morgan and love a quick catching of pain, a troubled stirring bordering on panic, rose in her breast. Where was Morgan, why did he remain away when he might come boldly now, like a man, and claim his own? What if Morgan never should come back? What if she should find herself a double widow, bereft of both the living and the dead?

During her days she watched for him, straining her eyes up and down the dust-white road. At night her cheek burned upon her pillow, and her tears ran down, yearning for the man who had her heart’s love in his keeping and seemed unworthy of the trust.

At such times her anger would flame hot against Joe. If he had not come into her affairs and muddled them, like a calf in a kitchen, all of this uncertainty and longing would have been spared her. And it would be like the fool now, the miserable, bleating bull-calf, to turn back on his word and betray her. In that case, what should she do? Bow her head, meekly, and bear him out? She did not think so. There was little chance that anybody would credit Joe if he should turn now on his own evidence, less if she should maintain that his first version of the tragedy was true. For what he had done by his impertinent meddling between her and Morgan he deserved to suffer. He must grin and bear it now, said she.

Besides this feeling of revenge on Joe’s luckless head, Ollie had her reasons of selfishness and security for desiring him213out of the way. With him in prison for a long time–people said it would be for life–the secret of her indiscretion with Morgan would be safe. And then, if Morgan never came back, perhaps another.

But she recoiled from the thought that they might hang Joe for the murder of Isom. She did not want him hung, for through her gathering cloud of blame for his too faithful guardianship of his master’s house, she had gleams of tenderness and gratitude for him. She could not help comparing him with Morgan in such moments of softness. Morgan had let that boy drive him away; he seemed to have gone with such a terror of him that he never had looked back. Joe, on the other hand, had stood by her through the storm. No, she did not want them to hang Joe, but it would be quite easy and comfortable with him out of the way for a long, long time.

Public opinion was framing toward giving her the relief that she desired. If anybody suspected that Ollie was concerned in her husband’s death, it was some remote person whose opinion did not affect the public mind. The current belief was that Joe alone was to blame.

No matter how severe the world may be upon a woman after she is down in the mire, there is no denying that it is reluctant to tumble her from her eminence and throw her there. A woman will find more champions than detractors in the face of the most serious charge; especially a young and pretty one, or one whose life has been such as to shape sympathy for her in itself.

All her neighbors knew that Isom’s wife had suffered. That year of penance in her life brought Ollie before them in a situation which was an argument and plea for their sympathy and support.

In spite, then, of the coroner’s attempt at the inquest to drag Ollie into the tragedy, and to give foundation for his214shrewd suspicion that there had been something between Isom’s wife and bondman which the husband was unaware of, no sensation nor scandal had come of that. The case was widely talked of, and it was the hope of every voter in the county that he would be drawn on the jury to try the boy accused of the murder. Even the busiest farmers began to plan their affairs so they would have at least one day to spare to attend the trial at its most interesting point.

The date set for the trial was approaching, and so was election day. The prosecuting attorney, being up for reelection, hadn’t time, at that busy hour, to try a homicide case. He had to make speeches, and bestir himself to save his valuable services to the state. The man penned in jail, growing thin of cheek and lank of limb, could wait. There would be other homicide cases, but there never would be another prosecuting attorney so valuable as that one offering himself, and his young ambitions, on the altar of public service. That was according to his view. So he notified Hammer that the state would not be ready for trial on the day set.

This pleased Hammer well enough, for the greater the delay the wider the notoriety of the case would spread, the larger his audience would be. By mutual agreement, the case was put over for one month.

Joe protested against this delay in vain. Hammer said that they would profit by it, as the ferment of the public mind would settle meantime, and prejudice would not be so sharp. He talked a great deal about “character witnesses,” which Joe couldn’t see the need of, and took down the names of all the people whom Joe could name as having known him all his life. Then Hammer went his way, to make speeches in the campaign in support of the worthy sheriff.

So Joe found himself with another month ahead of him before he could even hope to walk out into the sun again.215

Jail was wearing on him. The disgrace of it was torture to his sensitive mind, without the physical chafing to pull him down to bones. Those two weeks had taken off his frame a great deal of the flesh that he had gained during the summer. His gauntness was more pronounced than it ever had been before.

Mrs. Newbolt walked in twice a week to see him, carrying with her a basket of biscuits and other homely things dear to her son’s palate. All of which the sheriff speared with knitting-needles, and tried on various domestic animals, to make certain that the Widow Newbolt did not cheat the gallows out of its due by concealing saws in pies, or introducing poison to her hopeless offspring in boiled eggs.

But all of her tempting relishes, or such of them, at least, as reached Joe, were powerless to fill his hollow cheeks, growing thinner and paler day by day. He could not eat with relish, he could not sleep with peace. If it had not been for the new light that Alice Price had brought into his life, he must have burned his young heart to ashes in his restiveness.

Twice again the colonel and Alice had visited Joe, once to carry to him the books for which he had expressed a desire, and again to bring theMeditations of Marcus Aurelius, which Alice herself had gone after to Judge Maxwell’s house. Each time Joe fancied that she left a radiance behind her that brightened and warmed his cell for days.

Nobody else in the town troubled himself about the prisoner’s welfare, for nobody else knew him. Two of the ministers had called at the jail in the first days of Joe’s incarceration, in a sort of urging-to-penitence state of mind, just as if they were assured of Joe’s guilt by reason of his very obscurity. Joe had told them that he had a religion of his own which seemed to fill all present needs, and did not want to make any change. He was respectful, but lofty in his216bearing. So they put him down as a stiff-necked son of Belial, and went away, leaving him to save himself if he thought he was equal to the task, in a manner of challenge.

In the face of this clerical abandonment, people wondered over the deep interest that Colonel Price and his daughter seemed to have in the Widow Newbolt’s son, who had neither pride of family nor of possessions to recommend him.

Joe had not yet brought himself to the belief that it was necessary to take his lawyer into his confidence, although Hammer had made it unfeelingly plain to him that the withholding of any vital fact would be fatal to his cause. Although Joe was beginning to experience a deep and disquieting concern about the outcome of the trial, he was disposed to give Morgan an honest man’s chance to come forward and take his share of it upon himself. If he should do that, then Joe felt that he would be morally free to disclose all that took place in the kitchen on the night Isom lost his life.

In case that Morgan did not come, or that he had gone beyond the reach of Hammer or anybody else to fetch him back, then there would not be one word of evidence to uphold him, or justify his seemingly ridiculous stand of reticence. Yet, perhaps Morgan was waiting until the trial day; perhaps he knew all about it, and would appear in time. So argued Joe, in his great desire to be just to everybody.

He reviewed the matter in this wise with ceaseless repetition, always arriving at this same end, from which he drew the comfort of hope. Perhaps Morgan would come in time. At any event, he would wait until the last minute of the last hour, and give him a man’s chance to do what was honorable and fair.

The talkative horse-thief had been tried and condemned, and had gone his cheerful way to the penitentiary to serve three years. Before leaving he had taken pains to sound again his forecast of what was waiting Joe “down the river,”217in case they did not give him the “quick and painless.” He never had forgiven Joe his unwillingness to gossip with him in jail. The fellow’s vindictiveness was evident in the sneering delight that he took on his last night in jail in calling Joe out of his sleep, or pretended sleep, to hear his description of the terrors waiting a man condemned to prison for life.

Now that he was gone, Joe felt that his words lived after him, like mold upon the walls, or a chilling damp between the stones. The recollection of them could not be denied his abnormally sharpened senses, nor the undoubted truth of their terrifying picture shut out of his imagination by any door of reasoning that he had the strength to close. Condemnation to prison would mean the suspension of all his young hopes and healthy desires; it would bring him to the end of his activities in the world as suddenly as death. Considering ambition, love, happiness, men in prison were already dead. They lived only in their faculty for suffering.

Would Morgan come to save him from that fate? That was his sole speculation upon a solution of his pressing trouble. Without Morgan, Joe did not consider any other way.

Colonel Price had received lately a commission for a corn picture from a St. Louis hotel, upon which he was working without pause. He had reached that state of exalted certainty in relation to corn that he never was obliged to put aside his colors and wait the charge of inspiration. His inspirational tide always was setting in when corn was the subject. Work with the colonel in such case was a matter of daylight.

On account of the order, the colonel had no time for Joe, for art with him, especially corn art, was above the worries and concerns of all men. He did not forget the prisoner in the white heat of his commission. For several days he had it in his mind to ask Alice to visit him, and carry to him the assurance of the continuance of the family interest218and regard. But it was an unconventional thing to request of a young lady; a week slipped past before the colonel realized it while he temporized in his mind.

At last he approached it circuitously and with a great deal of diplomatic concealment of his purpose, leaving ample room for retreat without unmasking his intention, in case he should discern indications of unwillingness.

By that time the election was over and the country regularly insured against anarchy, devastation, and ruin for two years longer. The prosecuting attorney and the sheriff had been reelected; the machinery of the law was ready to turn at the grist.

The colonel was pleased to see that Alice seconded him in his admission that they had been treating Joe Newbolt shamefully. Of course the sheriff was partly to blame for that, having set himself up with metropolitan importance, now that he was secure in office. He had put aside Wednesday as the one day of the week on which visitors, other than relatives or counsel of prisoners, would be permitted to enter the jail.

It chanced to be a Wednesday morning when the colonel got around to it finally, and they agreed heartily and warmly that somebody ought to go and carry a little gleam of cheer and encouragement to Joe. The colonel looked at his unfinished picture, then at the mellow light of the autumn day, so much like the soul of corn itself, and then at Alice. He lifted his eyebrows and waved his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

“Never mind,” said she; “you go ahead with the picture; I’ll go alone.”

The colonel blessed her, and turned to his picture with a great sigh of relief. Alice left him to prepare for her visit, a flutter of eagerness in her heart, a feeling of timid nervousness which was unaccountable and strange.219

She was not accustomed to trembling at the thought of meeting young men. Usually she went forward to the ordeal with a smile, which the victim would not have gathered a great deal of pleasure from, in most cases, if he had been able to read, for he would have seen her appraisement of him on her lips. There was none of this amusing measurement of Joe, no sounding of his shallows with her quick perception like a sunbeam finding the pebbles in the bottom of a brook. There was something in his presence which seemed like a cool wind on the forehead, palpable, yet profound from the mystery of its source.

She had been surprised by the depth of this unpromising subject, to whom she had turned at first out of pity for his mother. The latent beauties of his rugged mind, full of the stately poetry of the old Hebrew chronicles, had begun to unfold to her sympathetic perception in the three visits she had made in her father’s company. Each visit had brought some new wonder from that crude storehouse of his mind, where Joe had been hoarding quaint treasures all his lonely, companionless years.

And Joe, even in his confinement, felt that he was free in a larger sense than he ever had been before. He was shaking out his wings and beginning to live understandingly and understood. It was beyond him to believe it sometimes; beyond him always to grasp the reality of Alice Price, and her friendship for one so near the dust as he.

What was there about the poor folks’ boy, bound out but yesterday to Isom Chase, and still bound to his estate under the terms of his articles? What was there in him to reach out and touch the sympathies of this beautiful young woman, who came to him with the scent of violets in her hair? Others had despised him for his poverty, and fastened a name upon him which was in itself a reproach. And still misunderstanding, they had carried him off to prison, charged with a dark220and hideous crime. Now this light had come to him in his despair, like the beam of that white star above the Judean plains. Like that star, she would stand far off to guide him, and exalt his soul by its strivings to attain her level. There their relations must cease. He might yearn his heart away in the gulf that lay between them, and stretch out his empty hands for evermore, never to feel its nearer warmth upon his breast. He was the poor folks’ boy.

There was a wan sun on the day she came alone to the jail, a day so long remembered by Joe and held by him so dear. A solemn wind was roaming the tree-tops outside his cell window; the branches stood bleak and bare against the mottled sky.

Alice wore a dress of some soft gray material, which seemed to embrace her in warm comfort, and reveal her in a new and sprightly loveliness. Her rippled hair was free upon her temples, her ear peeped out from beneath it with a roguish tint upon it, as if it waited to be kissed, and blushed for its own temerity. A gay little highland bonnet rode the brown billows of her abundant hair, saucy and bold as a corsair, with one bright little feather at its prow. Perhaps it was no more than a goose quill, or a cock’s plume dipped in dye, but to Joe it seemed as glorious as if it had been plucked from the fairest wing in the gardens of paradise.

The marvel of it came over Joe again as he stood close against the bars to greet her. She, so rare and fine, so genteel and fair, caring enough for him and his unpromising fate to put aside the joyous business of her unhampered life and seek him in that melancholy place. It seemed a dream, yet she was there, her delicate dark brows lifted questioningly, as if uncertain that he would approve her unconventional adventure, a smile in the depths of her serene, frank eyes. Her cheeks were glowing from the sparks of morning, and her ungloved hand was reaching out to meet him.221

He clasped it, and welcomed her with joy that he could not have simulated any more than he could have hidden. There was a tremor in his voice; a hot sweep of blood flamed in his face like a confession of his secret soul.

“I never saw you look so tall,” said he slowly, measuring her with adoring eyes.

“Maybe it’s the dress,” said she, looking herself over with a little expressive sweep of the hands, as if to put all the blame on that innocent nun-gray gown, if there was blame to be borne.

She wore a little bunch of mignonette upon her breast, just at the point where the slashing of her bodice ended, and the gray gave way to a wedge of virginal white, as if her sempstress had started to lay bare her heart. The flowers quivered as from some internal agitation, nestling their pale gold spikes against their lovely bed.

“I don’t know that it’s the dress,” said he, “but you do look taller than usual, it seems to me.”

She laughed, as if she found humor in his solemn repetition of such a trivial discovery.

“Well, I can’t help being tall,” she said. “How tall would you have a lady grow? How tall do you think one ought to be?”

“‘As high as my heart,’” said Joe, rememberingOrlando’swords.

The color deepened in her cheeks; she caught her breath with a little “Oh!”

She wondered what sprout of blue-blooded and true-blooded nobility in Shelbyville there was capable of turning a reply like that without straining for it more than that pale cavalier with his worn clothing hanging loose upon his bony frame. When she ventured to lift her eyes to his face, she found him grasping a bar of the cell door with one hand, as if he would tear it from its frame. His gaze was fixed upon the high222window, he did not turn. She felt that he was struggling with himself that moment, but whether to drive to speech or to withhold it, she could not tell.

“I wish I could go out there and run about five miles this morning,” he sighed.

She gave him sigh for sigh, feeling that something was lost. He had not striven with himself merely to say that. But from there they went on to talk of his coming trial, and to expose the mutual hope that no further excuse would be advanced for its continuance. He seemed to be certain that the trial would see an end of his difficulty, and she trembled to contemplate any other outcome.

So they stood and talked, and her face was glowing and her eyes were bright.

“Your cheeks are as red as bitter-sweet,” said he.

“There was frost last night,” she laughed, “and the cool wind makes my face burn.”

“I know just how it feels,” said he, looking again toward the window with pathetic wistfulness, the hunger of old longings in his eyes.

“It will not be long now until you are free,” she said in low voice of sympathy.

He was still looking at the brown branches of the bare elm, now palely touched with the cloud-filtered autumn sun.

“I know where there’s lots of it,” said he, as if to himself, “out in the hills. It loves to ramble over scrub-oak in the open places where there’s plenty of sun. I used to pick armloads of it the last year I went to school and carry it to the teacher. She liked to decorate the room with it.”

He turned to her with apologetic appeal, as if to excuse himself for having wandered away from her in his thoughts.

“I put it over the mantel,” she nodded; “it lasts all winter.”

“The wahoo’s red now, too,” said he. “Do you care for it?”223

“It doesn’t last as long as bitter-sweet,” said she.

“Bitter-sweet,” said he reflectively, looking down into the shadows which hung to the flagstones of the floor. Then he raised his eyes to hers and surprised them brimming with tears, for her heart was aching for him in a reflection of his own lonely pain.

“It is emblematic of life,” said he, reaching his hand out through the bars to her, as if to beg her not to grieve over the clouds of a day; “you know there are lots of comparisons and verses and sayings about it in that relation. It seems to me that I’ve always had more of the bitter than the sweet–but it will all come out right in time.”

She touched his hand.

“Do you like mignonette?” she asked. “I’ve brought you some.”

“I love it!” said he with boyish impetuosity. “I had a bed of it last–no, I mean the summer before last–before I was–before I went to work for Isom.”

She took the flowers from her bosom and placed them in his hand. The scent of them was in his nostrils, stirring memories of his old days of simple poverty, of days in the free fields. Again he turned his face toward the window, the little flowers clutched in his hand. His breast heaved as if he fought in the deep waters of his soul against some ignoble weakness.

She moved a little nearer, and reached timidly through the bars with the breathless quiet of one who offers a caress to a sleeper. Her finger-tips touched his arm.

“Joe,” said she, as if appealing in pity to him for permission to share his agony.

He lifted the flowers to his lips and kissed the stems where her hand had clasped them; then bowed his head, his strong shoulders against the bars.

“Joe!” Her voice was a whisper in his ear, more than224pity in it, so it seemed to him in the revelation of that moment; more than entreaty, more than consolation.

Her hand was on his arm; he turned to her, shaking the fallen locks of his wild hair back from his brow. Then her hand was in his, and there was a warm mist, as of summer clouds, before his eyes. Her face was before him, and near–so near. Not red like the bitter-sweet, but pale as the winter dawn. Her eyes were wide, her chin was lifted, and he was straining her to him with the jail door bars against his breast.

Love comes that way, and death; and the blow of sorrow; and the wrench of life’s last bitter pang. Only life is slow; tedious and laggard with its burdens and its gleams.

He remembered in a moment; the pressure of the bars against his breast recalled him to his sad estate. He released her hand and fell back a step from her, a sharp cry on his lips as if he had seen her crushed and mangled just beyond his reach.

“I didn’t mean to do that, Alice; I didn’t mean to do that!” said he, dropping to his knees before her as if struck down by a stunning blow. He bowed his head in contrite humiliation.

“I forgot where I was, Alice; I forgot!”

There was no displeasure in her face as she stood panting before the barred door, her hands to her heaving breast, her head thrown back. Her lips were parted; there was a light of exaltation in her eyes, as of one who has felt the benediction of a great and lasting joy. She put her hand through the bars again, and touched his bowed head.

“Don’t do that, Joe,” said she.

The sheriff’s key sounded in the lock of the corridor gate.

“Time’s up,” he called.

“All right; I’m coming,” Alice returned.

Joe stood, weak and trembling. He felt as if he had, in225the heat of some great passion, rashly risked life, and more than life; that he had only now dragged his battered body back to the narrow, precarious ledge from which he had leaped, and that safety was not his.

“I must go now,” said she, soft and low and in steady voice. “Good-bye.”

She gave him her hand, and he clung to it like a nestling fastening upon the last branch interposing between it and destruction.

“I forgot where I was,” said he weakly, his shaken mind incapable of comprehending things as they were, his abasement over the breach that he had committed being so profound. She withdrew her hand. When it was gone out of his, he remembered how warm it was with the tide of her young body, and how soft for his own work-roughened fingers to meet and enfold.

“I must go now,” said she again. Her feet sounded in the corridor as she ran away. A little way along she stopped. She was beyond his sight, but her voice sounded near him when she called back “Good-bye!”

She had not gone in anger nor displeasure, thought he, getting hand of his confused senses after a while, standing as she had left him, the flowers in his hand. Strangely exulting, strangely thrilling, mounting a moment like an eagle, plunging down now like a stone, Joe walked his cell.

What had he done, drawn on by that which he had read in her eyes in that poignant moment! In jail, locked behind a grated door of steel, he had taken her hand and drawn her to him until the shock of the bars had called back his manhood. He had taken advantage of her friendship and sympathy.

Prison was no place for love; a man locked in jail charged with a crime had no right to think of it. It was base of him, and unworthy. Still–mounting again in a swift, delicious226flight–it was sweet to know what her eyes had told him, sweeter to rest assured that she had not left him in scorn. Down again, a falling clod. Unless he had misinterpreted them in the ignorance of his untutored heart. Yet, that is a language that needs no lexicon, he knew.

Who is so simple, indeed, as to be unaware of that? How different this passion from that which Ollie’s uncovered bosom had stirred; how he burned with shame at the memory of that day!

Up and down he strode the morning through, his long, thin legs now spare in his boot-tops, his wide, bony shoulders sharp through his coat. The strong light fell on his gaunt face as he turned toward the window; shadows magnified its hollows when he turned toward the door. Now that the panic of it had left him, the sweetness of it remained.

How soft her hand was, how her yielding body swayed in his arm! How delicious her breath was on his face; how near her eyes, speaking to him, and her lips; how near her parted, warm, red lips!

He took up the Book, and turned with trembling hands to a place that he remembered well. There was something that he had read, not feeling, not understanding, words of which came back to him now. The Songs of Songs, Which is Solomon’s.

Ah, the Song of Songs! The music of it now was written in his heart. It was not the song in glorification and exaltation of the church that the translators had captioned it; not a song full of earthly symbols meant to represent spiritual passions. Joe had read it, time and again, in that application, and it had fallen flavorless upon his understanding. No; it was the song of a strong man to the woman whom he loved.

And the music of it, old but ever new in its human appeal, now was written in his heart.227

Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely. Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.... Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved....

Ah, until the day break!

In his rapt exaltation the boy’s face beamed as he strode swiftly the length of his cell. It would not be long until daybreak now. The judge would understand him, and would not press a man to tell what he had delicate reasons for concealing, when the concealment could bring harm to nobody, but boundless good to one weak creature who must wither otherwise in the blaze of shame.

He remembered the strong face and the long iron-gray hair of Judge Maxwell; only a little while ago Joe had given him some apples which he had stopped to admire as he drove past Isom’s orchard in his sagging, mud-splashed, old buggy. He was a good man; the uprightness of his life spoke from his face. Judge Maxwell was a man to understand.

Poor Ollie; poor weak, shrinking Ollie! Her frightened eyes glowed hot in his memory of the day of the inquest, carrying to him their appeal. Poor, mistaken, unguided Ollie! He would protect her to the last, as he had done at the beginning, and trust and hope that the judge, and Alice, and the colonel, and the whole world, would understand in due and proper time.

Back to IndexNext