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The Pimienta Pancakes
73

“That was all the pancake specifications I could get that night. I didn’t wonder that Jackson Bird found it uphill work. So I dropped the subject and talked with Uncle Emsley a while about hollow-horn and cyclones. And then Miss Willella came and said ‘Good-night,’ and I hit the breeze for the ranch.

“About a week afterward I met Jackson Bird riding out of Pimienta as I rode in, and we stopped in the road for a few frivolous remarks.

“‘Got the bill of particulars for them flapjacks yet?’ I asked him.

“‘Well, no,’ says Jackson. ‘I don’t seem to have any success in getting hold of it. Did you try?’

“‘I did,’ says I, ‘and ’twas like trying to dig a prairie dog out of his hole with a peanut hull. That pancake receipt must be a jookalorum, the way they hold on to it.’

“‘I’m most ready to give it up,’ says Jackson, so discouraged in his pronunciations that I felt sorry for him; ‘but I did want to know how to make them pancakes to eat on my lonely ranch,’ says he. ‘I lie awake of nights thinking how good they are.’

“‘You keep on trying for it,’ I tells him, ‘and I’ll do the same. One of us is bound to get a rope over its horns before long. Well, so-long, Jacksy.’

“You see, by this time we was on the peacefullest of terms. When I saw that he wasn’t after Miss Willella I had more endurable contemplations of that sandy-haired snoozer. In order to help out the ambi-