"Did you hear what that boy said?" asked Al Peters, laughingly drawing general attention to Ted.
"Of course, I would have enjoyed it," the boy explained, "but we don't need it for food, July says—I asked him—and it's a great pity to waste even an ounce of meat at such a time. The President and Mr. Hoover have asked everybody not to waste a scrap of food and not to eat any more than is actually necessary."
"Well, I'll be dog-on!" exclaimed Bud Jones, and the slackers in general looked their astonishment.
They had grown up to lavish feeding and wasteful methods in the handling of food. They had never heard of anything else, except perhaps in the case of some "triflin'" white man too lazy to work or some poor negro in rags, and they wondered that such "meanness" could be recommended by the President of the United States. Some of them were even inclined to doubt Ted's word. There was a suggestion of scorn in Al Peters' tone as he asked:
"What for?—for goodness' sake!"
"Why, to stave off famine, or near-famine," explained Ted. "We've got to help feed our allies in Europe as well as ourselves. They are too busy fighting to be able to raise their usual crops and their supplies from other countries are cut very short. I read not long ago that the German submarines had sent three million pounds of bacon and four million pounds of cheese to the bottom of the sea in a single week."
At this the uneducated young backwoodsmen who had been in hiding since the late spring of 1917 opened their eyes, several of them repeating the figures in astonishment.
"I heard tell of them submarines," one of them remarked. "They sneaks up on ships and shoots 'em from under the water."
"But why don't our people and our friends over the big water get after them sneakin' things and knock 'em out and stop it?" asked Bud Jones.
"We are doing all we can, and we are really doing a lot," said Ted. "Mr. Edison is working night and day on inventions and our destroyers are hunting submarines all the time, and they and the English destroyers bag a lot of them, too. They drop tremendous explosives where they see bubbles and it tears the submarine to pieces. But the Germans keep on building them very fast."