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.

"Such is Safety First: never been known to take a chance yet. Why, say,
a year ago when he sold off his wool there was a piece in the county
paper about him getting eighteen thousand dollars for it; so naturally
there was a man that said he was a well-known capitalist come up from
San Francisco to sell him some stock in a rubber company. Safety admits
he has the money and he goes down to the big city for a week at the
capitalist's expense, seeing the town's night life and the blue-print
maps and the engraved stock and samples of the rubber and the
capitalist's picture under a magnificent rubber tree in South America,
and he's lodged in a silk boudoir at the best hotel and wined and
dined very deleteriously and everything is agreed to. And the night
before he's going to put his eighteen thousand into this lovely rubber