Part 34 (2/2)
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 gla.s.ses, 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.
”Have you found them all?” he asked.
”I've found Milton and _The Lays of Ancient Rome_ and _Don Quixote_, but I can't find the _Meditations of Marcus Aurelius_,” said she.
”Judge Maxwell has it,” he nodded; ”he carried it away more than a month ago. It was the first time he ever met an English translation, he said.
I must get it from him; he has a remarkably short memory for borrowed books.”
Alice joined him in the laugh over the judge's shortcoming.
”He's a regular old dear!” she said.
”Ah, yes; if he was only forty years younger, Alice--if he was only forty years younger!” the colonel sighed.
”I like him better the way he is,” said she.
”Where did that boy ever hear tell of Marcus Aurelius?” he wondered.
”I don't know.” She shook her head. ”I don't understand him, he seems so strange and deep. He's not like a boy. You'd think, from talking with him, that he'd had university advantages.”
”It's blood,” said the colonel, with the proud swelling of a man who can boast that precious endowment himself, ”you can't keep it down. There's no use talking to me about this equality between men at the hour of birth; it's all a poetic fiction. It would take forty generations of this European sc.u.m such as is beginning to drift across to us and taint our national atmosphere to produce one Joe Newbolt! And he's got blood on only one side, at that.
”But the best in all the Newbolt generations that have gone before seem to be concentrated in that boy. He'll come through this thing as bright as a new bullet, and he'll make his mark in the world, too. Marcus Aurelius. Well, bless my soul!”
”Is it good?” she asked, stacking the books which she had selected on the table, standing with her hand on them, looking down at her smiling father with serious face.
”I wouldn't say that it would be good for a young lady with forty beaus and unable to choose among them, or for a frivolous young thing with three dances a week----”
”Oh, never more than two at the very height of social dissipation in Shelbyville!” she laughed.
He lifted a finger, imposing silence, and a laugh lurked in his eyes.
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