“He can order us off the place,” Jibby drawled in his slow way, “and he can sue us for trespass if we don’t go. I know that, because once, when father was digging for mastodon bones in a cornfield in Arizona, the man that owned the farm ordered father off and father did not want to go. So the man hit father on the head with a club, and father sued him for damages, and the justice of the peace made the man pay father five dollars for hitting him, and made father pay the man five dollars for trespassing, and neither of them _had_ five dollars.” “What did they do? Go to jail?” asked Bill Catlin. “No, sir,” Jibby said. “The justice of the peace lent father five dollars and father paid the man with it, and then the man paid father with it, and then father paid it back to the justice of the peace. Father says the justice said then, ‘There! I hope that will be a lesson to both of you. You have got off easy. If I had been hard-hearted, I would have made you pay each other ten dollars apiece, and I haven’t got but eight dollars and sixty cents, so where would you have been then?’” Bill Catlin laughed, and that made him like Jibby Jones right away, because laughing and liking are always close together. “I bet they would have gone to jail, just because they lacked a little common sense,” Bill Catlin said. “If I had been there, I could have fixed it up easy. I would have had your father borrow the eight dollars and sixty cents and pay the man, and then your father would have owed him only one dollar and forty cents. Then I would have had the man pay the money back to your father and the man would have owed your father only one dollar and forty cents. Then your father would have given the eight dollars and sixty cents back to the justice, and he wouldn’t have owed _him_ anything. And then all your father would have had to do would have been to borrow one dollar and forty cents from the justice, and when it had passed around, the whole ten dollars would have been paid. Nobody would have owed anybody anything. Your father and the man could have paid each other a million dollars that way. You’ve got to use common sense.” “Yes, sir,” Jibby said politely. It pleased Bill Catlin to have an intelligent-looking boy with tortoise-shell spectacles take what he said so seriously, and he was mighty tickled. “You’ve got common sense, and education, too; I can see that,” he said to Jibby, which wasn’t saying anything very nice to us, as I looked at it, but we didn’t say anything, because we saw Jibby was going to talk again.