“There are hardships worked in any administration,” Bob pointed out.

Amy looked at him slowly.

“You don’t believe that in this case,” she pronounced at last.

“Then Pollock will perjure himself,” suggested Bob, to try her.

“And if he has friends worth the name, they’ll perjure themselves, too!” cried Amy boldly.  “They’ll establish an alibi, they’ll invent a murderer for Plant, they’ll do anything for a man as persecuted and hunted as poor George Pollock!”

“Heavens!” returned Bob, genuinely aghast at this wholesale programme.  “What would become of morals and honour and law and all the rest of it, if that sort of thing obtained?”

“Law?” Amy caught him up.  “Law?  It’s become foolish.  No man lives capable of mastering it so completely that another man cannot find flaws in his best efforts.  Reuf and Schmitz are guilty—­everybody says so, even themselves.  Why aren’t they in jail?  Because of the law.  Don’t talk to me of law!”

“But how about ordinary mortals?  You can’t surely permit a man to lie in a court of justice just because he thinks his friend’s cause is just!”

“I don’t know anything about it,” sighed Amy, as though weary all at once, “except that it isn’t right.  The law should be a great and wise judge, humane and sympathetic.  George Pollock should be able to go to that judge and say:  ’I killed Plant, because he had done me an injury for which the perpetrator should suffer death.  He was permitted to do this because of the deficiency of the law.’  And he should be able to say it in all confidence that he would be given justice, eternal justice, and not a thing so warped by obscure and forgotten precedents that it fits nothing but some lawyer’s warped notion of logic!”

“Whew!” whistled Bob, “what a lady of theory and erudition it is!”

Amy eyed him doubtfully, then smiled.

“I’m glad you happened along,” said she.  “I feel better.  Now I believe I’ll be able to do something with my biscuits.”

“I could do justice to some of them,” remarked Bob, “and it would be the real thing without any precedents in that line whatever.”

“Come around later and you’ll have the chance,” invited Amy, again addressing herself to the stove.

Still smiling at this wholesale and feminine way of leaping directly to a despotically desired ideal result, Bob took the trail to his own camp.  Here he found Jack Pollock poring over an old illustrated paper.

“Hullo, Jack!” he called cheerfully.  “Not out on duty, eh?”

“I come in,” said Jack, rising to his feet and folding the old paper carefully.  He said nothing more, but stood eyeing his colleague gravely.

“You want something of me?” asked Bob.

“No,” denied Jack, “I don’t know nothing I want of you.  But I was told to come and get a piece of paper and maybe some money that a stranger was goin’ to leave by our chimbley.  It ain’t there.  You ain’t seen it, by any chance?”