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 the ocean yet branded!  And does Timmins want to throw in with us?  If he does mebbe they can fix up a deal with me because I want a good business man at the head of the new outfit.

But Safety says right off quick that it’s all a pack of nonsense.  He says it’s the mad dream of a visionary or feeble-minded person.  He don’t deny there would be money in whales if they could be handled, but you couldn’t handle anything that had the whole ocean to swim in that covers three quarters of the earth’s surface, as he has often read.  And how would you get a branding iron on a whale, and what good would it do you?  He’d beat it out for Europe.  He said they was foolish to think whales would stay in a herd, and he guessed I’d been talking just to hear myself talk, or more likely I’d been kidding ’em to get a good laugh.

Sandy says:  “Well, I wasn’t going to tell you at first, but I guess it’ll be safe with you, you being a good friend of the Arrowhead, only don’t let it go no farther; but the fact is the boss is negotiating for the whale privilege in Great Salt Lake.  Yes, sir, she’s bribing the Utah legislature this very minute to let the bill go through!  And I guess that don’t look much like kidding.  As soon as the governor has signed the bill she’ll put in a couple of good three-year-old bull whales and a nice little herd of heifers and have the world’s meat supply at her finger ends in less than five years—­just killing off the yearling steers.”

Safety looks a bit startled at this, and Sandy goes on to say that though whale meat is now but a fad of the idle rich it’s bound to be the meat of rich and poor alike in future.  He’d bet a thousand dollars to a dime that by the time the next war come along the first thing they’d do would be to establish a whaleless day.  He said whale meat was just that good.

Safety chewed his gum quite a time on this—­he says if a man chews gum he won’t ruin himself in pocket for tobacco—­and he read the whale article over carefully and looked at the pictures again, but he still said it didn’t sound to him like a legitimate business enterprise.  He said for one thing there’d be trouble shipping the original herd up to Salt Lake.  Sandy said it was true; there would be the initial expense of loading on to flat cars, and a couple of tunnels would have to be widened so the bulls wouldn’t be rasped going through, but that I have already taken this up with the railroad company.