Ma Pettengill | Page 3

left numerous openings; some humorous emprise of Sandy Sawtelle, presumably distressing; the gameness of one Timmins as a winner; the whale as a food animal; the spectacular price of mules broken to harness. Rather than choose blindly among them I spoke of my day's fishing. Departing at sunrise I had come in with a bounteous burden of rainbow trout, which I now said would prove no mean substitute for meat at the evening meal.
Then, as she grimly knitted, Ma Pettengill discoursed of other boasted substitutes for meat, none of which pleased her. Hogs and sheep were other substitutes, there being but one genuine meat, to wit, Beef. Take hogs; mean, unsociable animals, each hog going off by himself, cursing and swearing every step of the way. Had I ever seen a hog that thought any other hog was good enough to associate with him? No, I hadn't; nor nobody else. A good thing hogs couldn't know their present price. Stuck up enough already! And sheep? Silly. No minds of their own. Let one die and all the rest think they got to die also. Do it too. No brain. Of course the price tempted a lot of moral defectives to raise 'em, but when you reflected that you had to go afoot, with a dog that was smarter than any man at it, and a flea-bitten burro for your mess wagon---not for her. Give her a business where you could set on a horse. Yes, sir; people would get back to Nature and raise beef after the world had been made safe once more for a healthy appetite. This here craze for substitutes would die out. You couldn't tell her there was any great future for the canned jack-rabbit business, for instance--just a fad; and whales the same. She knew and I knew that a whale was too big to eat. People couldn't get any real feeling for it, and not a chance on earth to breed 'em up and improve the flesh. Wasn't that the truth? And these here diet experts, with their everlasting talk about carbos and hydrates, were they doing a thing but simply taking all the romance out of food? No, they were not. Of course honest fish, like trout, were all right if a body was sick or not hungry or something.
Trout reminded her of something, and here again the baleful tooth of calumny fleshed itself in the fair repute of one Timmins. She described him as "a strange growth named Timmins, that has the Lazy 8 Ranch over on the next creek and wears kind of aimless whiskers all over his face till you'd think he had a gas mask on." She talked freely of him.
"You know what he does when he wants a mess of trout? Takes one of these old-fashioned beer bottles with patent stoppers, fills it up with unslaked lime, pours in a little water, stops it up, drops it in a likely looking trout pool, and in one minute it explodes as good as something made by a Russian patriot; all the trout in the pool are knocked out and float on the surface, where this old highbinder gathers 'em in. He's a regular efficiency expert in sport. Take fall and spring, when the wild geese come through, he'll soak grain in alcohol and put it out for 'em over on the big marsh. First thing you know he'll have a drunken old goose by the legs, all maudlin and helpless. Puts him in a coop till he sobers up, then butchers him.
"Such is Safety First: never been known to take a chance yet. Why, say, a year ago when he sold off his wool there was a piece in the county paper about him getting eighteen thousand dollars for it; so naturally there was a man that said he was a well-known capitalist come up from San Francisco to sell him some stock in a rubber company. Safety admits he has the money and he goes down to the big city for a week at the capitalist's expense, seeing the town's night life and the blue-print maps and the engraved stock and samples of the rubber and the capitalist's picture under a magnificent rubber tree in South America, and he's lodged in a silk boudoir at the best hotel and wined and dined very deleteriously and everything is agreed to. And the night before he's going to put his eighteen thousand into this lovely rubber stock that will net him two hundred per cent, at the very lowest, on the capitalist's word of honour, what does he do but sneak out and take the train for home on his return ticket that he'd made the capitalist buy him.
"Ever talk to one of these rich capitalists that has rubber stock