“No—I didn’t,” the guard answered, “but I’ll go back pretty soon. They keep open all night. It’s early yet, anyhow.”
Jim offered the bottle to his friend. Hank took a good drink, which he needed after the excitement of the night. Then he passed the bottle back to Jim.
“If I was you I’d drink all that’s left; it’s good, but it’s pretty weak, all right. I’m sure you’d feel better to take it all.”
Jim raised it to his lips, tipped his head back and held the bottle almost straight until the last drop had run slowly down his throat.
IX
Jim laid the bottle on the bed and then sat down on his chair.
“My head begins to swim some but I guess I can finish the story all right. I know I’m pretty longwinded. Still I guess I can’t talk very much more if I wanted to. I’m glad the whiskey’s beginnin’ to get in its work; I don’t believe I’ll have much trouble gettin’ so drunk that I won’t know whether I’m goin’ to a hangin’ or a primary.
“Let me see; oh, yes, they hustled me into a cell and locked me up. I guess they thought best not to waste much time, for a good many people had got together on the outside.
“I think ‘twas on Friday they put me in. There wa’n’t nothin’ done on Saturday; but on Sunday they let us all go to church up in the chapel. They kep’ me pretty well guarded as if I might do somethin’ in the church, but there wa’n’t no way to get out if I wanted to. The preacher told us about the prodigal son, and how he repented of all his wanderin’s and sins and come back home, and how glad his father was to see him, and how he treated him better’n any of the rest that hadn’t never done wrong. He said that’s the way our Heavenly Father would feel about us, if we repented, and that it didn’t matter what we’d done—after we repented we was white as snow. One of the prisoners told me he was gettin’ kind of tired of the prodigal son; that ‘most every preacher that come told about the prodigal son just as if that story had been meant specially for them.