“After you had whittled straight ahead for two hundred years, you’d have a pile of shavings. The only way that you could handle them would be to stamp them down, every once a while, and, if the roof leaked, the shavings would get wet when it rained and cake down on the floor pretty solidly. Maybe, after a couple of hundred years, you’d get a solid layer of trampled shavings and dust about a foot thick. And scattered through this layer would be all the poor carvings that you hadn’t thought worth saving. You get that idea all right?” “Pat hand,” agreed the cowboy. “Go ahead.” “Then at the end of the two hundred years, a chap comes along and looks at your work. He thinks it’s fine, but tells you that pine is so soft and the grain is so big that you can’t carve the horses as delicately as you’d like. He shows you how oak would be a heap better. So you get hold of some oak and start whittling with oak.” “For another two hundred years?” “Yes,” agreed Perry. “Because the wood is harder and your knife is getting blunt—” “Lead me to a knife that’ll whittle steady for two hundred years! Why, Bub, it would have to be a diamond! But I forgot, we were just ‘supposin’.’” “An’ while you’re doing the best you can with that blunt knife,” the lad went on, “a fellow comes along and tells you that you’ll do a lot better if you use a chisel instead of a jack-knife. So you buy a chisel from this chap, and go ahead with your work. Now the chips from the chisel are going to be a little different from the shavings you made with the jack-knife, but they’ll be oak shavings still. Then, too, Dick, the oak being so much harder than the pine, you’ll only have half as many shavings, so it’ll take all of the four hundred years, two hundred with the jack-knife and two hundred with the chisel, to make another trampled-down layer of shavings a foot thick.” “I see how you’re headin’,” said the cowboy, nodding wisely, “an’ in the lower six inches o’ that oak stuff will be animals I whittled with the knife, and in the top half, the ones I worked out with the chisel. Is that the idee?” “To a hair!” exclaimed Perry. “By now you’re making corking good carvings—” “I’d be a looney if I didn’t, after six-hundred-years’ tryin’,” the cowboy interrupted. “And then along comes another man.” “Busy trail that,” Round-up Dick put in, who was obviously enjoying the tale thoroughly, “that’s three men in six hundred years. Not what you’d call crowded! What brilliant idee did this stranger have?” “Boxwood,” answered the boy, “harder than oak. And for the next two hundred years you worked in boxwood.” He paused. “An’ after that?” queried Round-up Dick. “Then you take a rest,” the boy suggested. “I thought I had somethin’ comin’,” the range-rider declared, with mock relief in his voice. “Painted Pinto! Wouldn’t I make a town hum after eight hundred years without a blow-out! An’ what happens after I’m gone? Another man comes, eh? Don’t get reckless with your population, Bub!”