“I allowed as how I knowed a few of the citizens by sight and more’n a dozen to speak to,” Uncle Ike went on, “and then he up and begun wantin’ to know. When folks gits to the wantin’-to-know stage on short acquaintance I git to the don’t-want-to-tell stage, and Mister Man didn’t collect no amazin’ store of knowledge, not while he was a-ridin’ on my bus.”
He stopped talking and looked at Mark, and Mark looked at him. Then Uncle Ike winked at Mark. “If I was a smart boy,” he said, “and a stranger feller come to town snoopin’ around and askin’ questions about whirligigs, I’d sorter look into it, I would. And if that stranger feller was askin’ about the i-dentical kind of a whirligig my father was makin’ in the barn and calc’latin’ to git rich out of I’d look into it perty close. And if my father was one of these here inventor fellers that forgits their own names and would trust a cow to walk through a cornfield I’d be perty sharp and plannin’ and keep my eye peeled. That’s what I’d do, and I ain’t drove a bus these twenty years for nothin’, neither. The place to git eddicated,” he said, “is on top of a bus. There ain’t nothin’ like it. There’s where you see folks goin’ away and comin’ home, and there’s where you see strangers and actors and travelin’-men, and everybody that walks the face of the earth. Colleges is all right, maybe, for readin’ and writin’, but when it comes to knowin’ who you kin depend on and who you got to look out for the bus is the place.”
“Did he ask about f-f-father?” Mark wanted to know.
“He didn’t mention him by name,” said Uncle Ike, grinning. “But he says to me, says he, ‘This is a nice town,’ says he, ‘and a town that looks as if there was smart folks in it. It’s lettle towns like this,’ he says, ‘that inventors and other great men comes from,’ says he. ‘Have you got any inventors here?’ he asks.
“‘There’s Pete Biggs,’ I says. ‘He’s up and invented a way to live without workin’.’
“‘Is that all?’ he asks, kind of disappointed.
“‘Wa-al,’ I says, like I was tryin’ hard to remember, ‘I did hear that Slim Peters invented some kind of a new front gate that would keep itself shut. But ’twan’t no go,’ I says, ‘’cause Slim he had to chop down the gate with a ax,’ I says, ‘the first time he wanted to go through it. It was a fine gate to stay shut,’ I says, ‘but it wa’n’t no good at all to come open.’
“‘Ain’t there anybody here tryin’ to make an engine?’ he put in.
“‘Engine?’ says I. ‘Engines is already invented, ain’t they? What’s the use inventin’ when some other feller’s done it first?’
“‘I mean a new kind of an engine,’ he says, ‘a kind they call a turbine?’