“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!”
“Not a stranger this time,” Perry went on, “but a cyclone.”
“Which I’m feelin’ grateful you let me get away first.”
“This is a real cyclone,” the boy continued, “and we’ll suppose that it tore the shanty in half, cutting it clean across the floor, the way cyclones often do, taking half of it away in a cloud of dust, but leaving half of it as straight cut as though you’d passed a knife through a layer cake.”
“And I returns to that scene of desolation?”
“You do,” Perry assented. “And there you see the half of the shanty and the floor, which is in three layers, the bottom one of pine shavings, the next one of oak, and the top one of boxwood. Then, since you remember how you used to work, you know that there are pine animals carved with a jack-knife in the bottom layer, oak animals carved with a jack-knife in the lower part of the oak layer, oak animals carved with a chisel in the top part of that layer, and boxwood animals in the top boxwood layer.”
Antoine nodded his head approvingly.
“That is a very good figure,” he said, “I think Mr. Round-up Dick can follow that.”