But in the first year it made so much money that Uncle Steve built a frame hotel, and this made so much money he built a big modern hotel, and it’s making so much money they’re putting on an addition this winter. It’s hard telling where the thing will stop.
UNCLE STEVE DRY AND DROLL
Uncle Steve is dry and droll. He’s dumb like a fox, and old fashioned like fluid drive. He’s about as skinny as I am, and his nose hangs over at the end like Puck’s. He sort of halfway grins when he talks, and his humor is so left-handed you don’t know half the time whether he’s joking or not.
He loves to talk about being an ignorant hillbilly. It gets funnier and funnier as it gradually dawns on you how all-fired smart Uncle Steve really is.
“I was educated at Bear Pen Holler University,” he says. That is his name for the School of Experience. “I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’, very much.”
If a local townsman asks him the population of Gatlinburg, or the number of tourist cabins here, or who plans to do what, Uncle Steve always says “I don’t know.” And he says it in a tone which implies, “Why you askin’ me, you know I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’.”
But I’ll bet there isn’t a minor item about anything that is or ever was in Gatlinburg that Uncle Steve doesn’t know.
“I don’t know no more about runnin’ a hotel now than when I started, and I didn’t know nothin’ then,” says Uncle Steve. “All I know is you cook and make the beds—and charge ’em a little.” That seems to me a pretty good basis to start on.
“I never kept a book in my life,” Uncle Steve says. “I never kept no track of how much I spent or how much I took in.” He apparently has stopped talking. You’re just ready to reply, or change the subject. And then finally, as a small afterthought, Uncle Steve looks over at you slantlike and says in a low voice, “I always come out a little ahead though.”