“It sure agrees with your by-laws,” observed Pringle. “You’re a sight changed from the furtive behemoth you was. You’ll make a hand yet. But, even now, your dimensions from east to west is plumb fascinatin’. I’d sure admire to have your picture to put in my cornfield.”
“Very well, Mr. Pringle: I’ll exchange photographs with you,” said Leo artlessly. A smothered laugh followed this remark; uncertainty as to what horrible and unnamed use Leo would make of Pringle’s pictured face appealed to these speculative minds.
“I’ve studied out this charm business,” said Jeff. “See if I’m not right. It’s because there’s no habitually old men here to pattern after, to steady us, to make us ashamed of just staying boys. Now and then you hit an octagonal cuss like Wes here, that on a mere count of years and hairs might be sized up as old by the superficial observer. But if I have ever met that man more addicted with vivid nonchalance as to further continuance of educational facilities than this same Also Ran, his number has now escaped me. Really aged old people stay where they was.”
“I think, myself, that what makes life so easy and congenial in these latigos and longitudes is the dearth of law and the ladies.” Thus Pringle, the cynic.
A fourfold outcry ensued; indignant repudiation of the latter heresy. Their protest rose above the customary subdued and quiet drawl of the out-of-doors man.
“But has the law no defenders?” demanded Leo. “We’ve got to have laws to make us behave.”
“Sure thing! Likewise, ’tis the waves that make the tide come in,” said Jeff. “A good law is as handy as a good pocketbook. But law, as simply such, independent of its merits, rouses no enthusiasm in my manly bosom, no more than a signboard the day after Hallowe’en. If it occurs to me in a moment of emotional sanity that the environments of the special case in hand call for a compound fracture of the statutes made and provided—for some totally different cases that happen to be called by the same name—I fall upon it with my glittering hew-gag, without no special wonder. For,” he declaimed, “I am endowed by nature with certain inalienable rights, among which are the high justice, the middle, and the low!”
“And who’s to be the judge of whether it’s a good law or not? You?”
“Me. Me, every time. Some one must. If I let some other man make up my mind I’ve got to use my judgment—picking the man I follow. By organizing myself into a Permanent Committee of One to do my own thinking I take my one chance of mistakes instead of two.”
“So you believe in doing evil that good may come, do you?”