human
I owe you sixty-nine cents for chicken feed, Gramps,
gpt
Serious matter, Gramps said gravely.
human
But I promise not to have the sheriff attach your flock if you pay in the next day or so. If you're dead set on having that worry off your mind, why don't you sell some eggs?
gpt
I'm saving them for hatching.
human
Can't save your eggs and pay your debts, too, Gramps pointed out.
gpt
How many you got laid by?
human
Forty-four.
gpt
Pat Haley'll buy 'em, and now that your hens have started laying something bigger'n robin's eggs, he'll pay better. You can pay me off and still have forty, fifty cents for yourself.
human
I have to save them,
gpt
You don't have to do anything of the kind, Gramps said.
human
If you're saving eggs it's 'cause you want to, and if you want to, it's 'cause you got something in mind. You aim to hatch those eggs?
gpt
Yes. I think the little house will hold maybe twenty hens and a rooster.
human
Gramps conceded.
gpt
So you have seven in there now and forty-four eggs saved. If you get an eighty per cent hatch, and that won't be bad for a rooster as don't yet know too much 'bout his business, you'll have thirty-five more chickens. So that makes forty-two in a twenty-one hen house. It don't add up.
human
That isn't what I have in mind. I'll keep fourteen of the best pullets and sell all the rest.
gpt
Something in that, Gramps admitted.
human
Pat Haley'll pay you the going price for both fryers and broilers. Take out the cost of feed, and if you're lucky, come fall you could have ten or fifteen dollars for yourself.
gpt
I hadn't meant to sell any for fryers. I'd hoped to sell the surplus as breeding stock.
human
Hope is the most stretchable word in the dictionary, Gramps said.
gpt
If we didn't have it we'd be better off dead but there's such a thing as having too much. Many a man who's tried to live on hope alone has ended up with both hands full of nothing. Do you think anybody who knows anything about poultry will pay you breeding-stock prices for chickens from an untried pen?
human
But my chickens have the best blood lines there are,
gpt
And it don't mean a blasted thing unless they have a lot of what it takes, Gramps said.
human
Joe Barston paid seven hundred and fifty dollars for a four-month-old bull calf whose ancestors had so much blue blood they all but wore monocles. But this calf threw the measliest lot of runts you ever saw and finally Joe sold him for beef. Now if you had a proven pen of chickens, if you could show in black and white that yours produced the most meat and laid the most eggs for the breed, you could sell breeding stock. Otherwise you're out of luck.