his mentor said she would knit two of the new short rows herself, just to make sure. And while she knitted these two rows she talked. She knitted them quickly, though the time must have seemed to Sandy much longer than it was.
"Here stands the greatest original humorist in Kulanche County," said the lady, with no longer a purring note in her voice. She boomed the announcement. Sandy, drooping above her, painfully wore the affectation of counting each stitch of the flashing needles. "And practical jokes—my sakes alive! He can think of the funniest jokes to put up on poor, unsuspecting people! Yes, sir; got a genius for it. And witty! Of course it ain't just what he says that's so funny—it's the noisy way he says it.
"And you wouldn't think it to look at him, but he's one of these here financial magnets, too. Oh, yes, indeed! Send him out with a hatful of ten-dollar bills any day and he won't let one of 'em go for a cent under six dollars, not if buyers is plenty—he's just that keen and avaricious. That's his way. Never trained for it, either; just took it up natural."
With drawn and ashen face Mr. Sawtelle received back his knitting. His pose was to appear vastly preoccupied and deaf to insult. He was still counting stitches as he turned away and clattered down the steps.
"Say!" called his employer. Sandy turned.
"Yes, ma'am!"
"You seen the party that stopped here this morning in that big, pompous touring car?"
"No, ma'am!"
"They was after mules."
"Yes, ma'am!"
"They offered me five hundred dollars a span for mine."
"No, ma'am—I mean, yes, ma'am!"
"That's all. I thought you'd rejoice to know it." The lady turned to me as if Mr. Sawtelle had left us. "Yes, sir; he'd make you die laughing with some of his pranks, that madcap would. I tell you, when he begins cutting up—"
But Mr. Sawtelle was leaving us rapidly. His figure seemed to be drawn in, as if he would appear smaller to us. Ma Pettengill seized her own knitting once more, stared grimly at it, then stared grimly down at the bunk house, within which her victim had vanished. A moment later she was pouring tobacco from a cloth sack into a brown cigarette paper. She drew the string of the sack—one end between her teeth—rolled the cigarette with one swift motion and, as she waited the blaze of her match, remarked that they had found a substitute for everything but the mule. The cigarette lighted, she burned at least a third of its length in one vast inhalation, which presently caused twin jets of smoke to issue from the rather widely separated corners of a generous mouth. Upon which she remarked that old Safety First Timmins was a game winner, about the gamest winner she'd ever lost to.
Three other mighty inhalations and the cigarette was done. Again she took up the knitting, pausing for but one brief speech before the needles began their shrewd play. This concerned the whale. She said the whale was the noblest beast left to us in all the animal kingdom and would vanish like the buffalo if treated as food. She said it was shameful to reduce this majestic creature of the deep to the dimensions of a chafing dish and a three-cornered slice of toast. Then she knitted.
She had 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 for sale in South America or a self-starting banana orchard? You know how good they are.
"You're certainly entitled to anything of your own that you've kept after they get through with you. And would you think that this poor, simple-minded old rancher would be any match for their wiles? But if you knew he had been a match and had nicked 'em for at least three hundred dollars, would you still think something malignant might be put over on him by a mere scrub buckeroo named Sandy Sawtelle, that never made a cent in his life except by the most degrading manual labour? No, you wouldn't. No fair-minded judge of criminals would.
"But I admit I had a weak moment. Yes, sir; for a brief spell I was all too human. Or I guess what it was. I was all blinded up with immoral designs, this here snake-blooded Timmins having put things over on me in stock deals from time
