Ajax, for Example

“Horse sense,” says “Magpie” Simpkins, “consists of knowing something that no school-teacher could pound into your head with a pile-driver. It’s a sort of an initiative and referendum that books can’t tell you about, and if you ain’t got it, Ike, you might as well get you a loaf of bread, a jug of wine and hide out in the brush, where you won’t hamper folks with your idiocy. There was Ajax, for example.”

Magpie hooks his spurs into the top of the table and leans back in his chair. He knows there ain’t no argument, but hopes I’ll find one. I agrees with Magpie—for once. I’ll tell you why I agree with him, and maybe you’ll agree with me.

Me and you both know that there’s educated fools. If I can have my choice I’ll take the fool that never got educated in preference to one what absorbed everything he found in books, ’cause the educated one can’t even crawl into a blanket without peering into a book to see the definition of the word “crawl,” the proper uses of a blanket, and the procedure according to precedent.

Yessir, there was Ajax, for example.

Me and Magpie are cooking breakfast in our cabin on Plenty Stone Creek one Summer morning, when we hears footsteps approaching on horseback. Magpie steps to the door with a pan of bacon in his hand and peers outside. He takes one look and tries to scratch his head with the pan, the same of which leaves our hog-meat on the floor.

Then he looks back at me.

“Ike, come here! It’s either a mistake or I’m mistaken.”

I walks over and takes a look. Looks like one of Sam Holt’s rat-tailed broncs, but the rider—whooee! I don’t blame Magpie for dropping the bacon. I’d ’a’ dropped a stick of dynamite if I’d had one.

I’ll begin at the top and work on down. First we have a hat. She looks like a cross between a ordinary hard hat and a campaign lid, being as she’s sort of flat on the top. Under said hat cometh hair, which seems to grow straight out.

Then we have a pair of funeral-rimmed specs forking the longest, skinniest nose I ever seen. I feels that it must blow about the same note as the stopped-down E string on a fiddle. The chin of the critter seems to be so long that the weight of it holds his mouth open.

We have with us now the neck. To speak like a poet I’d say that he had the neck of a swan. Maybe not 

  P 1/27 next