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 me." What Colonel Price replied Joe could not hear, for his low-modulated voice of culture was like velvet beside a horse-blanket compared to the sheriff's. "I'm over on this side, colonel, sir," said Joe before he could see him. And then the colonel stepped into the light which came through the cell window, bringing with him one who seemed as fair to Joe in that somber place as the bright creatures who stood before Jacob in Bethel that night he slept with his head upon a stone. "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."