That took a lot of thinking and brought back the wrinkles.
"Honesty—telling the truth," she said at last. "I guess it's the best something, but it ain't always the best policy. If I hadn't perjured myself, we wouldn't have won this strike."
"What?"
"I don't mind telling you. I lied in court. I swore I didn't hit Pick-Axe; but I tried to kill him."
Longman whistled softly.
"Tell me about it."
When she had told him all,—what Pick-Axe had said and done, how suddenly blind rage had overcome her, how at length Braun had persuaded her to lie,—she asked him if he thought honesty would have been the best policy in this case.
"I'm asking questions this afternoon, not answering them," he said gravely. "This interests me a lot. So you think it's sometimes right to lie in a good cause."
"No," she said quickly. "I don't think it's never right to lie. But I guess sometimes you've just got to. If I'd told the truth, they'd have sent me to prison, instead of the workhouse. I wouldn't have cared. It ain't nice to lie, and like Mr. Thoreau says, there's worse things than being in the worst prison. But it would have been awful for the others. Just because I told the truth all the papers would have lied and said all the girls were murderers. We'd have lost the strike. I'd have felt better if I'd told the truth. But there's more than two thousand girls in our trade.
"It's like this, I think. If you make up your mind that something is good, you got to fight for it; you can't be afraid of getting beat up, or arrested, or killed, and you can't be afraid of hurting your conscience either. Mr. Thoreau has got an essay about John Brown and how he fought to free the black slaves. Well, suppose somebody'd come to him and told him how he could do it, if he'd commit a big sin himself. I guess he'd have done it. If he'd said, 'You can beat me or put me in prison or hang me for those black men, but I won't sin for them,' he'd have been a coward. I'd rather go to prison than tell a lie like I done. But I ain't afraid to do both."