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.