be 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 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