Joe never knew what Colonel Price said to the sheriff; but after the little gleam of sun had faded out of his cell, and the gnawings of his stomach had become painfully acute, his keeper came down with a basket on his arm. He took from it a dinner of boiled cabbage and beef, such as a healthy man might lean upon with confidence, and the horse-thief came in for his share of it, also.
When the sheriff came to Joe's cell for the empty dishes, he seemed very solicitous for his comfort and welfare.
"Need any more cover on your bed, or anything?"
No, Joe thought there was enough cover; and he did not recall in his present satisfied state of stomach, that his cell lacked any other comfort that the sheriff could supply.
"Well, if you want anything, all you've got to do is holler," said the sheriff in a friendly way.
There is nothing equal to running for office to move the love of a man for his fellows, or to mellow his heart to magnanimous deeds.
"Say," called the horse-thief in voice softened by the vapors of his steaming dinner, "that friend of yours with the whiskers all over him is ace-high over here in this end of the dump! And say, friend, they could keep me here for life if they'd send purty girls like that one down here to see me once in a while. You're in right, friend; you certainly air in right!"
Colonel Price had kindled a fire in his library that night, for the first chill of frost was in the air. He sat in meditative pose, the newspaper spread wide and crumpling upon the floor beside him in his listlessly swinging hand. The light of the blazing logs was laughing in his glasses, and the soft gleam of the shaded lamp was on his hair.
Books by the hundred were there in the shelves about him. Old books, brown in the dignity of age and service to generations of men; new books, tucked among them in bright colors, like transient blooms in the homely stability of garden soil. There was a long oak table, made of native lumber and finished in its natural color, smoke-brown from age, like the books; and there was Alice, like a nimble bee skimming the sweets of flowers, flitting here and there in this scholar's sanctuary.
Colonel Price looked up out of his meditation and followed her with a smile.