e something more than papers to make people understand that he had
a gentleman's reason, and not a thief's, for concealing what they had
pressed him to reveal.

There was a woman first, and that was about all that Joe could make of
the situation up to that time. She must be protected, even though
unworthy. None knew of that taint upon her but himself and the fugitive
author of it, but Joe could not bring himself to contemplate liberty
bought at the price of her public degradation. This conclusion refreshed
him, and dispelled the phantoms from his hot brain.

After the sounds of the town had fallen quiet, and the knocking of feet
on the pavement along his prison wall had ceased, Joe slept. He woke
steady, and himself again, long before he could see the sun, yellow on
the boughs of the elm-tree.

The sheriff furnished him a piece of comb, and he smoothed his hair by
guess, a desperate character, such as he was accounted by the officer,
not being allowed the luxury of a mirror. One might lick the quicksilver
from the back of a mirror, or open an artery with a fragment of it, or
even pound the glass and swallow it. Almost anything was nicer than
hanging, so the sheriff said.

Scant as the food had been at Isom's until his revolt had forced a
revision of the old man's lifelong standard, Joe felt that morning after
his second jail breakfast that he would have welcomed even a hog-jowl
and beans. The sheriff was allowed but forty cents a day for the
maintenance of each prisoner, and, counting out the twenty-five cents
profit which he felt as a politician in good standing to be his due, the
prisoners' picking was very lean indeed.

That morning Joe's breakfast had been corn-pone, cold, with no lubricant
to ease it down the lane. There had been a certain squeamish liquid in
addition, which gave off the smell of a burning straw-stack, served in a
large tin cup. Joe had not tasted it, but his nose had told him that it
was "wheat coffee," a brew which his mother had made sometimes in the
old days of their darkest adversity.

Joe knew from the experience of the previous day that there would be
nothing more offered to fortify the stomach until evening. The
horse-thief called up from his end of the jail, asking Joe how he liked
the fare.

Reserved as Joe was disposed to be toward him, he expressed himself
somewhat fully on the subject of the sheriff's cuisine. The horse-thief
suggested a petition to the county court or a letter