The man said, "Well, you youngsters, the people that pay me to let this
sign stand here don't pay me to let you climb all over it. Now you come
down off there, every one of you, and we'll see what's what. We'll see
what the jedge has to say."
"Don't go down," Dorry whispered.
"That shows how much you know about law," Pee-wee shouted down. "My
uncle's got a friend who's a lawyer. If this sign has a right here we
have a right here because we're part of the sign. You can, ask Mr. Bull
who works for Brown's Hats if we're not. Do you see what it says on this
sign? Always on top? That means us. It means us just as much as the
hats. We belong here, so there."
The man said, "Haow did you get here without trespassin'?"
I said, "That isn't the question. We're here because we're here. The
question is has the sign got a right to be here?"
"Sure," Pee-wee yelled down, "that's logic." He looked awful funny
sitting up there and shouting down at the man. "Suppose a thing has a
right to be in a place but the people that own that thing don't own the
place. If you're on the thing----"
"You ain't got no right there," the man shouted up.
"Lift the ladder up," Westy said.
"Sure, that's strategy," Pee-wee said.
So we hauled the ladder up out of the man's reach.
"Do you admit that somebody can own a place that has a thing on it that
belongs to somebody else that has something on it----"
"Shut up," I said. Then I said to the man, "It says on this sign that
we're on top. You see it? That means us. This kid is right; we're part
of this sign, just as if we were painted here."
"Put that ladder down," the man shouted.
"Does it belong to you?" Westy said.
"It's on my land," the man hollered at us.
I said, "Well, we just took it off your land."
"If you want to take the sign away go ahead and do it," Westy said.
"We should worry," I called down.
"We can stand on the law, can't we?" the kid piped up.
"We can sit on the sign, that's better," I said.
The man said, "Are you going to put that ladder down here?"
"No, we're not," Westy said.
"We're part of this sign and we're going to stay here," the kid said.
"If anybody paid you money for letting the sign be here, that includes
us. We're an advertisement of Brown's Hats, that's what we are. We're on
top. It says so. If a thing belongs to a thing, it belongs to that thing
and not the land that thing is on, doesn't it? If you rent out a place
to put a thing then the thing that's on that thing isn't trespassing on
the land that was rented out for the thing underneath it, is it?"
"It's as clear as mud," I said. "We've got as much right here as a man's
hat has got on top of his head even if his head is in the wrong place."
"That's logic," the kid shouted.
"It's as true as a false alarm," Westy said.
"Truer," Warde put in.
"A sign is something that's got something on it," our young hero
shouted. "Let's hear you deny that."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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