With devilish mirth the murderer would sometimes offer to find the head. “Leave me my hands free and send but two men, your bravest, strongest picked men to guard me, and I will send you back the head--I swear it!” he would say; and to the Sheriff’s smiling question, “And you? You say ‘send,’ not ‘bring.’ Would you not bring the head back?” he would reply, “Oh, I say now, you don’t think me quite a fool, do you?” and though he would laugh heartily enough, there would be a quickening of his breath and a hot spark away back in his eye not very pleasant nor by any means reassuring to the man who was responsible for his safe keeping.
Two days after I had picked this bitter fruit from the tree of knowledge I found myself, under the orders of my yellow-haired, little tyrant, slowly and unwillingly entering the jail corridor again. Holding me by the hand, he pulled me past the turnkey and made straight for the dreaded cell. At our entrance various greetings reached us: “Hello, babies!” “How are you, little ones?” “Come up here, youngster, where I can see you!” while the man with the cough called out, “Sissy, come here and I’ll give you half of my licorice!”
But I stood in silence, my eyes fixed upon the stone pavement, while my little companion, trembling with excitement, put his first, troubled, anxious question: “Dear Mr. No. 3, are you truly a-goin’ to die?”
The silence that came upon the occupants of the other cells at this question might have been the silence of death. Mr. No. 3 made a little sound like that the grown-ups make sometimes, and afterward say: “Oh, I had, a stitch in my side!” and then he answered, “Why--er--yes, my boy--we are all going to die--you know that!”
Charley’s delicate brows knit themselves together distressfully as he slowly murmured, “Yes, evweybody. My papa is the biggest mans in this town and he’s goin’ to die, the whole of him, only, only--” suddenly his brow cleared and he hurried on--“only he and us allis jus’ goin’ to die som’time, not a ’xac’ly day to know about. Are you goin’ to die in free weeks? Please don’t!”
Instead of answering directly, he turned to me with, “What’s the matter, little lass? Why don’t you speak; are you sick, child?”