"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?" "Well," said Jeff judicially, "it seems to be at least as good a proposition as doing good that evil may come of it. Why, Capricorn, there isn't one thing we call wrong, when other men do it, that hasn't been lawful, some time or other. When to break a law is to do a wrong, it's evil. When it's doing right to break a law, it's not evil. Got that? It's not wrong to keep a just law--and if it's wrong to break an unjust law I want a new dictionary with pictures of it in the back." "But laws is useful and excitin' diversions to break up the monogamy," said Aforesaid. "And it's a dead easy way to build up a rep. Look at the edge I've got on you fellows. You're just supposed to be honest--but I've been proved honest, frequent!" "Hark!" said Pringle. A weird sound reached them--the night wrangler, beguiling his lonely vigil with song. "Oh, the cuckoo is a pretty bird; she comes in the spring----" "What do you s'pose that night-hawk thinks about the majesty of the law?" he said. There was a ringing note in his voice. Smith and Headlight nodded gravely; their lean, brown faces hardened. "You haven't heard of it? Old John Taylor, daddy to yonder warbler, drifted here from the East. Wife and little girl both puny. Taylor takes up a homestead on the Feliz. He wasn't affluent none. I let him have my old paint pony, Freckles--him being knee-sprung and not up to cow-work. To make out an unparalleled team, he got Ed Poe's Billy Bowlegs, nee Gambler, him havin' won a new name by a misunderstanding with a prairie-dog hole. Taylor paid Poe for him in work. He was a willin' old rooster, Taylor, but futile and left-handed all over. "John, Junior, he was only thirteen. Him and the old man moseyed around like two drunk ants, fixin' up a little log house with rock chimbleys, a horse-pen and shelter, rail-fencin' of the little _vegas_ to put to crops, and so on.