d 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 su