s a liar, but I could write down to Red
Gap to a lawyer, and the lawyer would get plenty of people to swear to it
right in the courthouse. And so now I must hurry up and stock the place
with these animals and have more meat than anybody in the world and get
rich pretty quick. Forty times he stretched his arms to show me how big
one of these hams would be, and he said the best part was that this
animal hardly ate anything at all but a little popcorn and a few peanuts.
Hadn't he watched it for hours? And if I didn't hurry others would get
the idea and run prices up.

I guess Pete's commercial mind must of been engaged by hearing the boys
talk about whales. He hadn't held with the whale proposition, not for a
minute, after he learned they live in the ocean. He once had a good look
at the ocean and he promptly said "Too much water!" But here was a land
animal packing nearly as much meat as a whale, eating almost nothing, and
as tame as a puppy. "I think, 'Injun how you smart!'" he says when he got
through telling me all this in a very secret and important way.

I told him he was very smart indeed and ought to have a job with the
Government at a dollar a year telling people to quit beef meat for the
elephant. I said I was much obliged for the tip and if I ever got to
going good in elephants I'd see he had a critter of his own to butcher
every fall. So Pete went out with all his excitement and told the boys
how I was going to stock the ranch with these new animals which was
better than whales because you wouldn't have to get your feet wet. The
boys made much of it right off.

In no time at all they had all the white-faces sold off and vast herds of
pure-bred elephants roaming over the ranch with the Arrowhead brand on
'em. Down on the flat lands they had waving fields of popcorn and up
above here they had a thousand acres of ripening peanuts; and Sandy
Sawtelle, the king of the humourists, he hit on another idea that would
bring in fifty thousand dollars a year just on the side. He said if a
crowd come along to a ranch and bought the rancher's own hay for the sake
of feeding it to his own steers they would be thought weak-minded. Not so
with elephants. He said people would come from far and near and bring
their little ones to buy our own peanuts and popcorn to feed our own
elephants. All we needed to do was put the stuff up in sacks at a nickel
a throw. He said of course the novelty might die out in time, but if he
could on