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 195 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 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