“Could you give me a drink of water—or could you make it whiskey? I’m sure that would be better for Jim.” The guard passed him a flask, and told him to just keep it. Hank took a drink himself and handed it to Jim. “Well, I guess ‘twould do me good. I believe if I was out of here I wouldn’t never take any more, but I don’t see any use stoppin’ now; anyhow I’ll need a lot of it in the mornin’. Just ask the guard if any word has come for me. I s’pose he’d told me, though, if it had.” Jim held the bottle to his mouth long enough to drink nearly half of what was left. Hank looked out at the silent corridors. Over in the court he could still hear the hammer and the voices of the workmen; from the upper tiers, the wild shriek of an insane man called on someone to save him from an imaginary foe. A solitary carriage rolled along the pavement and the voices of two or three men singing came up from the street below. A faint breath from the lake just stirred the heavy prison smell that seemed dense enough to be felt. The guard asked him how he was managing to pass the night. Hank answered that it was going much faster than he had thought. “Poor fellow,” said the guard, “I’ll be kind of lonesome when he’s gone. He’s been a good prisoner.” This was the highest character that a guard could give. “Well, Hank, if you are ready now, I’ll go on with my story. That whiskey kind of braced me up, and I s’pose you needed it too, after listenin’ so long. I must hurry, for I ain’t near through with what I wanted to say. I’ve thought lots about how I hit her, and I s’pose I ought to think it was awful, and it looks so to me now, and still it didn’t seem so then. I can’t help thinkin’ of what that feller said to us in his speech. He claimed that punishin’ people didn’t do no good; that other people was just as likely to kill someone if you hung anybody, as they would be if you let ‘em go, and he went on to say that they used to hang people for stealin’ sheep and still just as many sheep got stole and probably more’n there was after they done away with it. I don’t s’pose I ever should have thought anything about it if I hadn’t killed her, but, of course, that made me think a lot. I’m sure that I wouldn’t do such a thing again; I wouldn’t be near so likely to do it as I was before, because now I know how them things commence, and I’m awful, awful sorry for her too. There wa’n’t no reason why she should die, and why I should have killed her, and if there was anything I could do to change it, of course I would.