It merely brought more about mules.  Five hundred dollars a span for mules looked good until you remembered that you needed ’em worse than the other party did.  She had to keep her twenty span of old reliables because, what with the sailors and section hands you got nowadays to do your haying, you had to have tame mules.  Give ’em any other kind and they’d desert the ship the minute a team started to run.  It cost too much for wagon repairs.

Silence again.

I now said I had, it was true, heard much low neighbourhood scandal about the Timmins man, but that I had learned not to believe all I heard about people; there was too much prejudice in the world, and at least two sides to every question.

This merely evoked the item that Timmins had bought him a thrift stamp on the sole ground that it had such a pretty name; then came the wish that she might have seen him dining in public at that rich hotel where the capitalist paid the bills.

She thought people must have been startled by some of his actions.

“Yes, sir; that old outlaw will eat soup or any soft food with almost no strategy at all.”

As we seemed to be getting nowhere I meanly rolled the lady a cigarette.  She hates to stop knitting to roll one, but she will stop to light it.

She stopped now, and as I held the match for her I said quite frankly that it had become necessary for me to be told the whole thing from start to finish.  She said she had told me everything—­and believed it—­but would go over it again if I didn’t understand.  Though not always starting at command, the lady has really a full habit of speech.

I told you about whales, didn’t I?  Whales started it—­whales for table use.  It come in the Sunday paper—­with the picture of a handsome whale and the picture of a French cook kissing his fingers over the way he has cooked some of it; and the picture of a pleased young couple eating whale in a swell restaurant; and the picture of a fair young bride in her kitchenette cutting up three cents’ worth of whale meat into a chafing dish and saying how glad she was to have something tasty and cheap for dearie’s lunch; and the picture of a poor labouring man being told by someone down in Washington, D.C., that’s making a dollar a year, that a nickel’s worth of prime whale meat has more actual nourishment than a dollar’s worth of porterhouse steak; and so on, till you’d think the world’s food troubles was going to be settled in jig time; 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.