“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.