“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 space 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.
“He’ll not do any harm, don’t be afraid,” said he.
“No, I’m not,” she told him, drawing a little nearer, quite unconsciously, he knew, as she spoke. “I was thinking how dreadful it must be here for you, especially in the night. But it will not be for long,” she cheered him; “we know they’ll soon set you free.”
“I suppose a person would think a guilty man would suffer more here than an innocent one,” said he, “but I don’t think that’s so. That man down there knows he’s going to be 199 sent to the penitentiary for stealing a horse, but he sings.”
She was looking at him, a little cloud of perplexity in her eyes, as if there was something about him which she had not looked for and did not quite understand. She blushed when Joe turned toward her, slowly, and caught her eyes at their sounding.
He was thinking over a problem new to him, also–the difference in women. There was Ollie, who marked a period in his life when he began to understand these things, dimly. Ollie was not like this one in any particular that he could discover as common between them. She was far back in the past today, like a simple lesson, hard in its hour, but conquered and put by. Here was one as far above Ollie as a star.