Ma Pettengill | Page 5

all people had to do was to go out and get a good eating whale and salt down the side meat and smoke the shoulders and grind up some sausage and be fixed for the winter, with plenty to send a mess round to the neighbours now and then.
And knocking beef, you understand, till you'd think no one but criminals and idiots would ever touch a real steak again, on account of its being so poor in food values, like this Washington scientist says that gets a dollar a year salary and earns every cent of it. It made me mad, the slanderous things they said about beef; but I read the piece over pretty carefully and I really couldn't see where the whale was going to put me out of business, at least for a couple years yet. It looked like I'd have time, anyway, to make a clean-up before you'd be able to go into any butcher shop and get a rib roast of young whale for six cents, with a bushel or two of scraps thrown in for the dog.
Then this Sunday paper goes out to the bunk house and the boys find the whale piece and get excited about it. Looks like if it's true that most of 'em will be driving ice wagons or something for a living. They want me to send down for a mess of whale meat so they can see if it tastes like regular food. They don't hardly believe these pictures where people dressed up like they had money are going into spasms of delight about it. Still, they don't know--poor credulous dubs! They think things you see in a Sunday paper might be true now and then, even if it is most always a pack of lies thought up by dissipated newspaper men.
I tell 'em they can send for a whole whale if they want to pay for it, but none of my money goes that way so long as stall-fed beef retains its present flavour; and furthermore I expect to be doing business right here for years after the whale fad has died out--doing the best I can with about ten silly cowhands taking the rest cure at my expense the minute I step off the place. I said there was no doubt they should all be added to the ranks of the unemployed that very minute--but due to other well-known causes than the wiping out of the cattle industry by cold whale hash in jelly, which happened to be the dish this French chef was going crazy over.
They chewed over that pointed information for a while, then they got to making each other bets of a thousand dollars about what whale meat would taste like; whether whale liver and bacon could be told from natural liver and bacon, and whether whale steak would probably taste like catfish or mebbe more like mud turtle. Sandy Sawtelle, who always knows everything by divine right, like you might say, he says in superior tones that it won't taste like either one but has a flavour all its own, which even he can't describe, though it will be something like the meat of the wild sea cow, which roams the ocean in vast herds off the coast of Florida.
Then they consider the question of a whale round-up in an expert manner. It don't look none too good, going out on rodeo in water about three miles too deep for wading, though the idea of lass'ing a whale calf and branding it does hold a certain fascination. Sandy says it would be the only livestock business on earth where you don't always have to be fearing a dry season; and Buck Devine says that's so, and likewise the range is practically unlimited, as any one can see from a good map, and wouldn't it be fine riding herd in a steam yacht with a high-class bartender handy, instead of on a so-and-so cayuse that was liable any minute to trade ends and pour you out of the saddle on to your lame shoulder.
They'd got to kidding about it by this time, when who should ride up but old Safety First Timmins. They spring the food whale on Safety with much flourish. They show him the pictures and quote prices on the hoof--which are low, but look what even a runt of a yearling whale that was calved late in the fall would weigh on the scales!--and no worry about fences or free range or winter feeding or water holes; nothing to do but ride round on your private steamboat with a good orchestra, and a chance to be dissolute and count your money. And look what a snap the pioneers will have with all the mavericks; probably not a single whale in