“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 198 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.”