"About our Mr. Smith, now," he inquired as he dragged Donahue away from the water, "what do you think? What particular branch of high crime does he favor. He is a specialist, of course. He is far too clever a man to scatter himself on general practitioning in this age of specialists. What do you suggest?
"He is a large round man with a kind eye. He could sell mining stocks. But, somehow, I rather feel that he'd be above preying on widows and school teachers and innocent clergymen. I think he'd prefer some excitement in his.
"He might be a head waiter, of course. But no law has yet been invented to make those gentlemen flee to the woods.
"I'll have to give it up, if you have nothing to suggest," he concluded lamely.
When he had filled Donahue's measure of oats he left him feeding at the wagon and came to the fire.
Augusta was hanging a pot of potatoes over the fire from a long crooked iron hook that was sunk into the ground. The big man had gone down to the brook where, it appeared, he had a string of live fish in captivity.
"Do you think we are wise?" said Jimmie cautiously. "We can't tell, you know. People might be looking for him. And suppose he had taken things and brought them here. And if we were found here," he worried on, "why, we simply haven't any credentials at all. And we're a deuce of a long ways from anybody that knows us. It might be very mean for you—these country sheriffs, you know, they might bundle the whole of us off to the nearest county jail, wherever it is."
"I don't care," said Augusta warmly, flushing over the fire. "Just look at the man. I know he didn't do anything really wrong."
"That's the woman of it," Jimmie argued meanly, "just because a man looks like a well preserved and benevolent Greek god and talks with a soft brogue, then the law of the land must be wrong."
"Well, the law is wrong lots of times," Augusta answered evenly. And Jimmie wondered whether women, with all the terrible discipline which nature and human society put upon them, were not essentially more lawless than men; or was it that they had gotten a larger share of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and actually did know good from evil.