Rat Bait

Some Mexican laborers disbanded their camp at Porterville, Calif, last week There was no work on the farms, no food, no place to go. Cesario Delgado and ten others decided they would make for Old Mexico by way of Bakersfield. Ysobel Nunez and Alexandro Deloa said they were going to take their families to Fresno, maybe find winter work there. Bernardo Ries said he would go along. Cesario Delgado hiked over to a doctor's barn and stole a sack of barley, which he distributed among the parting families. With dull adios they scattered.

The Fresno-bound party slept at Tipton where, before they went northward, they traded some barley with Felicitas Guerreo's aunt. The old woman gave the barley to her niece to make some tortillas. They all cursed those vile vagabonds from Porterville, because the tortillas tasted so bad. The barley must have been spoiled. The Guerreos buried the food. But the chickens scratched it up, gobbled it down and promptly died. Felicitas Guerreo, 19, felt too miserable to curse. Her legs and stomach ached. Her parents hurried her to a hospital at Visalia.

The travelers, meanwhile, had reached Fresno's outskirts where a Mexican told Ysobel Nunez that he could get him a job. The Nunezes were very happy, and Senora Nicholosa Nunez made a big mess of barley tortillas to celebrate. The Deloas and Bernardo Ries joined in, and some strangers appeared to dance and wish them luck. The four Nunez children ate until they nearly burst. The two Deloa children, being guests, were more mannerly. That was lucky for them. For in a few days everyone who had eaten at Nicholosa Nunez's banquet had the gripes, the Nunezes worst of all. Everyone's feet ached. Everyone suffered from strangury.

The four Nunez children died. All the rest went to the county hospital at Fresno where Senoras Nunez and Deloa died.

The barley which Cesario Delgado foraged at Porterville was rat & squirrel bait. It had been poisoned with thallium chloride. Thallium is one of the rare metals. It stands in the periodic system of the elements between mercury and lead. Close neighbors are gold, platinum and bismuth. Nearby is radium. Thallium is deadly poison itself, poisons every compound it goes into. None of them can be discerned by taste, smell or feel.

One of thallium's peculiar properties is that it causes hair to fall out. Foolish women and masquerading criminals use it as a depilatory. For a while some orphan asylums used thallium pastes and pills to bare the heads of children infected with ringworm of the scalp.

There is no specific cure for thallium poisoning. But J. C. Munch of Glen Olden, Pa., who last year made a report on the "Pharmacology of Thallium and Its Use in Rodent Control" for the U. S. Department of Agriculture, found pilocarpine helpful. Philocarpine, an active poison from the tropical American jaborandi shrub, stimulates many of the physiological activities which thallium destroys. It causes saliva and urine to flow, hair to grow. Mr. Munch telegraphed instructions to California on how to use the drug, took a plane to administer it himself.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.