Nothing’s going to happen.
He’ll be all right here.
He knows it.
You’ve got to go home and get some sleep, because you’ll both be leaving here tomorrow.
Come, now.”
“I reckon I better stay,” she said.
“Damn it, dont you know that putting yourself in the position for disaster is the surest way in the world to bring it about?
Hasn’t your own experience shown you that?
Lee knows it.
Lee, make her stop this.”
“Go on, Ruby,” Goodwin said.
“Go home and go to bed.”
“I reckon I better stay,” she said.
Horace stood over them.
The woman mused above the child, her face bent and her whole body motionless.
Goodwin leaned back against the wall, his brown wrists folded into the faded sleeves of his shirt.
“You’re a man now,” Horace said.
“Aren’t you?
I wish that jury could see you now, locked up in a concrete cell, scaring women and children with fifth grade ghost stories.
They’d know you never had the guts to kill anybody.”
“You better go on and go to bed yourself,” Goodwin said.
“We could sleep here, if there wasn’t so much noise going on.”
“No; that’s too sensible for us to do,” Horace said.
He left the cell.
The jailer unlocked the door for him and he quitted the building.
In ten minutes he returned, with a parcel.
Goodwin had not moved.
The woman watched him open the package.
It contained a bottle of milk, a box of candy, a box of cigars.
He gave Goodwin one of the cigars and took one himself.
“You brought his bottle, didn’t you?”
The woman produced the bottle from a bundle beneath the cot.
“It’s got some in it,” she said.
She filled it from the bottle.
Horace lit his and Goodwin’s cigars.
When he looked again the bottle was gone.
“Not time to feed him yet?” he said.
“I’m warming it,” the woman said.
“Oh,” Horace said.
He tilted the chair against the wall, across the cell from the cot.
“Here’s room on the bed,” the woman said.
“It’s softer. Some.”
“Not enough to change, though,” Horace said.
“Look here,” Goodwin said, “you go on home.
No use in you doing this.”
“We’ve got a little work to do,” Horace said.
“That lawyer’ll call her again in the morning.
That’s his only chance: to invalidate her testimony someway.
You might try to get some sleep while we go over it.”
“All right,” Goodwin said.