“Why, I haven’t written once a month.”
“Probably not, but you have got to write once a week now. Your mother’ll get used to it. I should think you’d be glad to do the only thing you can for the mother that’s worked her fingers off for you.”
“I am glad,” said Paisley, sullenly.
He never made any further demur. He wrote very good letters; and more and more, as the time passed, he grew interested in the correspondence. Meanwhile he began to acquire (quite unsuspected by the sheriff) a queer respect for that personage. The sheriff was popular among the prisoners; perhaps the general sentiment was voiced by one of them, who exclaimed, one day, after his visit, “Well, I never did see a man as had killed so many men put on so little airs!”
Paisley began his acquaintance with a contempt for the slow-moving intellect that he attributed to his sluggish-looking captor. He felt the superiority of his own better education. It was grateful to his vanity to sneer in secret at Wickliff’s slips in grammar or information. And presently he had opportunity to indulge his humor in this respect, for Wickliff began lending him books. The jail library, as a rule, was managed by Mrs. Raker. She was, she used to say, “a great reader,” and dearly loved “a nice story that made you cry all the way through and ended right.” Her taste was catholic in fiction (she never read anything else), and her favorites were Mrs. Southworth, Charles Dickens, and Walter Scott. The sheriff’s own reading seldom strayed beyond the daily papers, but with the aid of a legal friend he had selected some standard biographies and histories to add to the singular conglomeration of fiction and religion sent to the jail by a charitable public. On Paisley’s request for reading, the sheriff went to Mrs. Raker. She promptly pulled Ishmael Worth, or Out of the Depths, from the shelf. “It’s beautiful,” says she, “and when he gits through with that he can have the Pickwick Papers to cheer him up. Only I kinder hate to lend that book to the prisoners; there’s so much about good eatin’ in it, it makes ’em dissatisfied with the table.”
“He’s got to have something improving, too,” says the sheriff. “I guess the history of the United States will do; you’ve read the others, and know they’re all right. I’ll run through this.”
He told Paisley the next morning that he had sat up almost all night reading, he was so afraid that enough of the thirteen States wouldn’t ratify the Constitution. This was only one of the artless comments that tickled Paisley. Yet he soon began to notice the sheriff’s keenness of observation, and a kind of work-a-day sense that served him well. He fell to wondering, during those long nights when his cough kept him awake, whether his own brilliant and subtle ingenuity had done as much for him. He could hardly tell the moment of its beginning, but he began to value the approval of this big, ignorant, clumsy, strong man.
Insensibly he grew to thinking of conduct more in the sheriff’s fashion; and his letters not only reflected the change in his moral point of view, they began to have more and more to say of the sheriff. Very soon the mother began to be pathetically thankful to this good friend of her boy, whose habits were so correct, whose influence so admirable. In her grateful happiness over the frequent letters and their affection were revealed the unexpressed fears that had tortured her for years. She asked for Wickliff’s picture. Paisley did not know that the sheriff had a photograph taken on purpose. Mrs. Smith pronounced him “a handsome man.” To be sure, the unscarred side of his face was taken. “He looks firm, too,” wrote the poor mother, whose own boy had never known how to be firm; “I think he must be a Daniel.”
“A which?” exclaimed the puzzled Daniel.
“Didn’t you ever go to Sunday-school? Don’t you know the verses,