The Bondboy Part 33

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 was "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 pet.i.tion 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 pa.s.sage, "you'll git plenty to eat, and three times a day, too.

When they put a feller in the death-cell they pa.s.s 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 G.o.d, 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 sound of 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, and _then_ you'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 gra.s.s. And you'll think of gra.s.s 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, I _know_, 'y G.o.d! 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 coward who 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 h.e.l.l 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.

"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 tastes in 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, turning to 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 s.p.a.ce 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.