There was a pine table upon a raised platform, behind which Hiram Butefish remained, as before, the Club's honored President.
In the corner was a stove which had been donated by the Methodist minister, because, presumably, of a refractory grate which it was found impossible to operate without profanity.
Into these comfortable and spacious quarters, a goodly number of Prouty's representative citizens came singly and in squads upon the occasion of this important meeting.
Each member had kept his own solution of Prouty's problem closely guarded, so no man knew what his neighbor had to offer until that one's turn came to divulge it. In truth, it had been a long time since a meeting of such piquancy and interest had been called.
After some little preliminary business, Hiram Butefish, with a candor which never before had distinguished his public utterances upon this subject, declared flatly that Prouty was in a precarious, not to say desperate, condition. The county treasury was empty, the town treasury was empty, and the warrants of either had little more value than the stock certificates of an abandoned gold mine. What were they going to do about it? Should they sit quietly and starve like a lost tribe wandering in the desert? Did they wish to see their wives naked and their children hungry? No! Mr. Butefish smote the table until the crack in the water pitcher lengthened. Then by all that was Great and Good, somebody had to think of something!
Mr. Butefish had only said what everybody knew, but his manner of saying it sent a chill over every one present.
"Doc" Fussel, whose sales during the day had been a package of rat poison and a bottle of painkiller, looked like a lemon that has lain too long in the window, when he arose and diffidently offered his suggestion for the relief of Prouty. The doctor's voice when he was frightened had the rich sonorous tones of a mouse squeaking in the wall, and now as he ventured the suggestion that Prouty's hope lay in raising peppermint, his voice was inaudible beyond the fifth row of chairs. In the rear of the room they caught the words "mint" and "still," and were under the impression that he was advocating the manufacture of counterfeit money and moonshine whiskey. As a matter of fact, the doctor advised the purchase of large tracts of land which could be flooded and transformed into bogs. These bogs were to be planted in peppermint, for which, he averred, there was an insatiable demand. The world had yet to have too much peppermint. So long as there were babies there would be colic, and so long as there was colic there would be a need for peppermint; therefore, reasoning along the dotted line from A to Z, there always would be a market. Peppermint was the one industry requiring small capital which had not been overdone. He could go to Illinois and purchase a secondhand still of which he knew, at small cost. A bottling works for preparing and labeling the essence could be established in Prouty, and there was no reason why, in time, Prouty should not become the recognized peppermint center of America.