“I am full of wisdom——”
“Don’t argue with that animated flagpole,” says Dirty. “You never get no place talkin’ back to him, Ike.”
Dirty was right. I might as well argue with the shadder of death, because Magpie can’t hear nothing but his own voice in a argument, and he knows he can hoodle me into places where an angel couldn’t find footing nor room to flop its wings.
I’m sleeping real hard when Magpie comes home that night, and he proceeds to sit down on me, yanks my off ear and yells—
“Ike!”
I shoves him off and sets up, covering him with my gun.
“Ike,” says he, sober-like, “what is there around here that looks the most like a ca-mel?”
“It’s a neck-and-neck race between you and Maud S.”
“Thanks.”
He takes off his clothes and goes to bed, kinda chuckling to himself. Maud S wasn’t no relation to the famous trotting mare of the same name, unless you figure back to the dim and distant past to the time when the devil got sore at a balky horse. He tried to haul it along by the ears, but the horse dug in his hoofs, the same of which stretched them ears a heap. When the devil saw what he’d done, he laughed. The horse, being kinda sore, ruined its vocal cords mocking the devil’s laugh. That’s how we got our first mule.