"This is my daughter," said Colonel Price. "We called in to kind of cheer you up."
She offered Joe her hand between the bars; his went forward to meet it gropingly, for it lacked the guidance of his eyes.
Joe was honey-bound, like an eager bee in the heart of some great golden flower, tangled and leashed in a thousand strands of her hair. The lone sunbeam of his prison had slipped beyond the lintel of his low door, as if it had timed its coming to welcome her, and now it lay like a hand in benediction above her brow.
Her hair was as brown as wild honey; a golden glint lay in it here and there under the sun, like the honeycomb. A smile kindled in her brown eyes as she looked at him, and ran out to the corners of them in little crinkles, then moved slowly upon her lips. Her face was quick with the eagerness of youth, and she was tall.
"I'm surely beholden to you, Miss Price, for this favor," said Joe, lapsing into the Kentucky mode of speech, "and I'm ashamed to be caught in such a place as this."
"You have nothing to be ashamed of," said she; "we know you are innocent."
"Thank you kindly, Miss Price," said he with quaint, old courtesy that came to him from some cavalier of Cromwell's day.
"I thought you'd better meet Alice," explained the colonel, "and get acquainted with her, for young people have tastes in common that old codgers like me have outgrown. She might see some way that I would overlook to make you more comfortable here during the time you will be obliged to wait."
"Yes, sir," said Joe, hearing the colonel's voice, but not making much out of what he was saying.
He was thinking that out of the gloom of his late cogitations she had come, like hope hastening to refute the argument of the horse-thief. His case could not be so despairing with one like her believing in him. It was a matter beyond a person such as a horse-thief, of course. One of a finer nature could understand.
"Father spoke of some books," she ventured; "if you will----"
Her voice was checked suddenly by a sound which rose out of the farther end of the corridor and made her start and clutch her father's arm. Joe pressed his face against the bars and looked along at his fellow prisoner, who was dragging his tin cup over the bars of his cell door with rapid strokes.