His voice was quietly humorous. “Them sort of hangin’s ain’t advertised a heap. It’s hard to find anybody that will admit he had a hand in it. Nobody knows anything about it. But it’s done, an’ can’t be undone. An’ the rustlin’ stops mighty sudden.”
“Oh,” she exclaimed, “what a barbarous custom!”
“I reckon it ain’t exactly barbarous, ma’am,” he contended mildly. “Would you have the rustlers go on stealin’ forever, an’ not try to stop them?”
“There are the courts,” she insisted.
“Turnin’ rustlers off scot-free, ma’am. They can’t hold them. An’ if a rustler is hung, he don’t get any more than is comin’ to him. Do you reckon there’s a lot of difference between a half dozen men hangin’ a man for a crime he’s done, than for one man, a judge for instance, orderin’ him to be hung? If, we’ll say, a hundred men elect a judge to do certain things, is it any more wrong for the hundred men to do them things than for the man they’ve elected to do them? I reckon not, ma’am. Of course, if the hundred men did somethin’ that the judge hadn’t been elected to do, why then, it might make some difference.”
“But you say there is no law that provides hanging for rustling.” She thought she had him.
“The men that elected the judge made the laws,” he said. “They have a right to make others, whenever they’re needed.”
“That’s mob law,” she said with a shiver. “What would become of the world if that custom were followed everywhere?”
“I wouldn’t say that it would be a good thing everywhere. Where there’s courts that can be got at easy, there’d be no sense to it. But out here there’s no other way for a man to protect his property. He’s got to take the law into his own hands.”
“It is a crude and cold-blooded way.”