“Pine an’ a jack-knife,” agreed the cowboy. “I’ve got your trail so far.”
“You whittled these horses out of pine with a jack-knife for two hundred years straight ahead,” suggested Perry, “and any one of them that you didn’t think good enough you chucked on the floor, where it soon got buried by the shavings that came showering down. Don’t forget, Dick, you’re working like a son of a gun all this time.”
“Don’t I ever get a day off for a bust-up?” queried Dick.
“Never,” the boy replied.
“Say, pard,” the range-rider protested, “don’t ride a good horse to death, even in a pipe-dream!”
Perry laughed and continued:
“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?”