soft paper, packed in barrels, and shipped to Fort Wayne. Where
they couldn't reach by hand, they stood on barrels or ladders, and used
a long handled picker, so as not to bruise the fruit. Laddie helped
with everything through the day, worked at his books at night, and
whenever he stepped outside he looked in the direction of Pryors'. He
climbed to the topmost limbs of the trees with a big basket, picked it
full and let it down with a long piece of clothesline. I loved to be
in the orchard when they were working; there were plenty of summer
apples to eat yet; it was fun to watch the men, and sometimes I could
be useful by handing baskets or heaping up apples to be buried for us.

One night father read about a man who had been hanged for killing
another man, and they cut him down too soon, so he came alive, and they
had to hang him over; and father got all worked up about it. He said
the man had suffered death the first time to "all intents and
purposes," so that fulfilled the requirements of the law, and they were
wrong when they hanged him again. Laddie said it was a piece of
bungling sure enough, but the law said a man must be "hanged by his
neck until he was dead," and if he weren't dead, why, it was plain he
hadn't fulfilled the requirements of the law, so they were forced to
hang him again. Father said that law was wrong; the man never should
have been hanged in the first place. They talked and argued until we
were all excited about it, and the next evening after school Leon and I
were helping pick apples, and when father and Laddie went to the barn
with a load we sat down to rest and we thought about what they said.

"Gee, that was tough on the man!" said Leon, "but I guess the law is
all right. Of course he wouldn't want to die, and twice over at that,
but I don't suppose the man he killed liked to die either. I think if
you take a life, it's all right to give your own to pay for it."

"Leon," I said, "some time when you are fighting Absalom Saunders or
Lou Wicks, just awful, if you hit them too hard on some tender spot and
kill them, would you want to die to pay for it?"

"I wouldn't want to, but I guess I'd have to," said Leon. "That's the
law, and it's as good a way to make it as any. But I'm not going to
kill any one. I've studied my physiology hard to find all the spots
that will kill. I never hit them behind the ear, or in the pit of the
stomach; I just black their eyes, bloody their snoots