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“Good morning, doctor,” Jack said. “How did you sleep?” “Hardly at all,” the physician grumbled. “I guess it was that sleeping bag. I almost smothered to death and my feet froze.” Whitewashing a ratReub’s most famous story is one which he presents in his book as a true story, and you can make of that claim what you will. It seems he bought a ranch that had been a successful, going concern, but had been vacant for a while. During that time, the rats had moved in, and the place was utterly infested with them. Reub could not seem to get rid of them. “I tried poisoning, shooting, trapping — all the things I knew about,” he wrote. “The rats outsmarted me on every turn.” Then one day while he was griping about his dilemma to a neighbor, the neighbor suggested what you might call a folk remedy — that is, if you were feeling charitable; if you weren’t, you might call the neighbor’s suggestion something else. He said if Reub would just catch a full-grown rat, whitewash him and turn him loose again, the other rats would think he was a ghost and would all leave. “That didn’t seem to be the sort of thing a person could believe with all his heart,” Reub added dryly, “but the remedy was cheap and I was desperate.” So Reub caught one of the rats, a nice big one, and alerted the neighbor. They brought the rat out to the road for the whitewashing, and soon a large group was assembled there: Reub and his two hired hands, the neighbor and his hired hands, and “a couple other amateur rat specialists.” “At that point, several technical points arose,” Reub wrote. “Such questions came up as whether the whitewash should go on with the grain of the hair, thereby getting a smooth, slick job, or whether against the grain, thereby being more thorough, but leaving him rough and unattractive. Should we let the whitewash dry before turning him loose? Should we mix white of egg, flour paste, or anything in the whitewash to make it sticky?” While they were all there clustered around the rat and struggling with these scientific questions, a big, fancy red car pulled up to the group. The driver stopped and stuck his head out the window, trying to get a glimpse of what the fuss was about. “What in hell is going on here?” he asked. “I said carelessly, ‘Oh, we’re just whitewashing a rat,’” Reub wrote. “He said incredulously, ‘You’re what?’ I said, as though it was an everyday occurrence and I was a little impatient with him, ‘Just whitewashing a rat.’” The stranger said nothing more, and when Reub looked up again he was racing off into the distance … most likely, just as fast as his fancy red car would go.
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