The visitors made a murmur of approbation. Their
steps moved away; Lemuel heard the guide saying, “Dunno
what that fellow’s in for. Find out in
the captain’s room.”
“He didn’t look like a very abandoned
ruffian,” said one of the visitors, with both
pity and amusement in his voice.
Lemuel stood and leaned his head against the wall
of his cell. The tears that had come to his relief
in the morning when he found that he was robbed would
not come now. He was trembling with famine and
weakness, but he could not lie down; it would be like
accepting his fate, and every fibre of his body joined
his soul in rebellion against that. The hunger
gnawed him incessantly, mixed with an awful sickness.
After a long time a policeman passed his door with
another prisoner, a drunken woman, whom he locked
into a cell at the end of the corridor. When
he came back, Lemuel could endure it no longer.
“Say!” he called huskily through his door.
“Won’t you give me a cup of that coffee
upstairs? I haven’t had anything but an
apple to eat for nearly two days. I don’t
want you to give me the coffee. You can
take my clasp button——”
The officer went by a few steps, then he came back,
and peered in through the door at Lemuel’s face.
“Oh! that’s you?” he said: he
was the officer who had arrested Lemuel.
“Yes. Please get me the coffee. I’m
afraid I shall have a fit of sickness if I go much
longer.”
“Well,” said the officer, “I guess
I can get you something.” He went away,
and came back, after Lemuel had given up the hope of
his return, with a saucerless cup of coffee, and a
slice of buttered bread laid on the top of it.
He passed it in through the opening at the bottom
of the door.
“Oh, my!” gasped the starving boy.
He thought he should drop the cup, his hand shook
so when he took it. He gulped the coffee, and
swallowed the bread in a frenzy.
“Here—here’s the button,”
he said, as he passed the empty cup out to the officer.
“I don’t want your button,” answered
the policeman. He hesitated a moment. “I
shall be round at the court in the morning, and I guess
if it ain’t right we can make it so.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Lemuel, humbly
grateful.
“You lay down now,” said the officer.
“We shan’t put anybody in on you to-night.”
“I guess I better,” said Lemuel.
He crept in upon the lower shelf, and stretched himself
out in his clothes, with his arm under his head for
a pillow. The drunken woman at the end of the
corridor was clamouring to get out. She wished
to get out just half a minute, she said, and settle
with that hussy; then she would come back willingly.
Sometimes she sang, sometimes she swore; but with the
coffee still sensibly hot in his stomach, and the comfort
of it in every vein, her uproar turned into an agreeable
fantastic medley for Lemuel, and he thought it was
the folks singing in church at Willoughby Pastures,
and they were all asking him who the new girl in the
choir was, and he was saying Statira Dudley; and then
it all slipped off into a smooth, yellow nothingness,
and he heard some one calling him to get up.
