After nearly half an hour the door opened and Bob Collingham came in with a basket containing sandwiches and a thermos bottle of hot coffee. With a word of explanation to the guards, he was allowed to take his seat beside the prisoner.
"Hello, old sport! Must be relieved that it's so soon going to be over. Brought you something to eat."
With this introduction, they took up commonplace ground as if it was a commonplace occasion. Teddy asked after his mother and sisters; Bob gave him the family news. Of the trial they said nothing. Of what they were waiting for no more was said than that Bob had persuaded Jennie and Gussie to go home, promising to come and tell them the decision. Lizzie and Gladys had not appeared in the courtroom at all. Of all this Teddy approved as he munched his sandwiches stolidly.
The supply of food and coffee being large, they invited the guards to share with them. The invitation was accepted, the officers suspending their game. The talk became friendly, commenting on the judge's wig and the glass eye of the foreman of the jury, but not touching directly on the trial. These subjects, as well as the supply of sandwiches, exhausted, the guards returned to their game, the two young men being left to themselves.
For the most part they sat in silence—a silence as nearly cheerful as the circumstances permitted.
"Don't worry about me, Bob," Teddy murmured once. "I'm not going to care much whichever way it is. Honest to God! I don't say I wouldn't like it if they sent me back home; but if they don't—"
Allowing his companion to finish the sentence for himself, he lapsed into silence again.
Another time, speaking as if subterranean thought came for a moment to the surface, he said:
"I liked what you said about hardness—and pluck. I've been practicing away on them both—making myself tough inside. Funny how you can, isn't it? You think at first that, because you're soft, you've got to be soft; but you find out that you're just what you like to make yourself. That's a great line, Bob, 'Thou therefore endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.' You watch," he added, with a tremulous smile, "and you'll see me doing it."
"All right, old boy, I'll watch, but we'll all be doing it with you. We're practicing, too. Jennie and the girls are regular bricks, and, of course, your mother—"