You see me and Idaho never had any education beyond reading and doing if John had three apples and James five on a slate. We never felt any special need for a university degree, though we had acquired a species of intrinsic intelligence in knocking around the world that we could use in emergencies. But snow-bound in that cabin in the Bitter Roots, we felt for the first time that if we had studied Homer or Greek and fractions and the higher branches of information, wed have had some resources in the line of meditation and private thought. Ive seen them eastern college fellows working in camps all through the West, and I never noticed but what education was less of a drawback to em than you would think. Why, once over on Snake River, when Andrew McWilliams saddle horse got the botts, he sent a buckboard ten miles for one of these strangers that claimed to be a botanist. But that horse died.
One morning Idaho was poking around with a stick on top of a little shelf that was too high to reach. Two books fell down to the floor. I started toward em but caught Idahos eye. He speaks for the first time in a week.
Dont burn your fingers, says he. In spite of the fact that youre only fit to be the companion of a sleeping mud-turtle, Ill give you a square deal. And thats more than your parents did when they turned you loose in the world with the sociability of a rattlesnake and the bedside manner of a frozen turnip. Ill play you a game of seven-up, the winner to pick up his choice of the book, the loser to take the other.
We played; and Idaho won. He picked up his book, and I took mine. Then each of us got on his side of the house and went to reading.
I never was as glad to see a ten-ounce nugget as I was that book. And Idaho looked at his like a kid looks at a stick of candy.
Mine was a little book about five by six inches called Herkimers Handbook of Indispensable Information. I may be wrong, but I think that was the greatest book that ever was written. Ive got it to-day; and I can stump you or any man fifty times in five minutes with the information in it. Talk about Solomon or the New York Tribune! Herkimer had cases on both of em. That man must have put in fifty years and travelled a million miles to find out all that stuff. There was the population of all cities in it, and the way to tell a girls age, and the number of teeth a camel has. It told you the longest tunnel in the world, the number of the states, how long it takes for chicken pox to break out, what a ladys neck ought to measure, the veto powers of Governors, the dates of the Roman aqueducts, how many pounds of rice going without three beers a day would buy, the average annual temperature of Augusta, Maine, the quantity of seed required to plant an acre of carrots in drills, antidotes for poisons, the number of hairs on a blond ladys head, how to preserve eggs, the height of all the mountains in the world, and the dates of all wars and battles and how to restore drowned persons, and sunstroke, and the number of tacks in a pound, and how to make dynamite and flowers and beds, and what to do before the doctor comes and a hundred times as many things besides. If there was anything Herkimer didnt know I didnt miss it out of the book.
I sat and read that book for four hours. All the wonders of education was compressed in it. I forgot the snow, and I forgot that me and old Idaho was on the outs. He was sitting still on a stool reading away with a kind of partly soft and partly mysterious look shining through his tanbark whiskers.
Idaho, says I, what kind of a book is yours?
Idaho must have forgot, too, for he answered moderate, without any slander or malignity.
Why, says he, this here seems to be a volume by Homer K. M.[17]
Homer K. M. what? I asked.
Why, just Homer K. M., says he.
Youre a liar, says I, a little riled that Idaho should try to put me up a tree. No man is going round signing books with his initials. If its Homer K. M. Spoopendyke, or Homer K. M. McSweeney, or Homer K. M. Jones, why dont you say so like a man instead of biting off the end of it like a calf chewing off the tail of a shirt on a clothesline?
I put it to you straight, Sandy, says Idaho, quiet. Its a poem book, says he, by Homer K. M. I couldnt get colour out of it at first, but theres a vein if you follow it up. I wouldnt have missed this book for a pair of red blankets.
Youre welcome to it, says I. What I want is a disinterested statement of facts for the mind to work on, and thats what I seem to find in the book Ive drawn.
What youve got, says Idaho, is statistics, the lowest grade of information that exists. Theyll poison your mind. Give me old K. M.s system of surmises. He seems to be a kind of a wine agent. His regular toast is nothing doing, and he seems to have a grouch, but he keeps it so well lubricated with booze that his worst kicks sound like an invitation to split a quart. But its poetry, says Idaho, and I have sensations of scorn for that truck of yours that tries to convey sense in feet and inches. When it comes to explaining the instinct of philosophy through the art of nature, old K. M. has got your man beat by drills, rows, paragraphs, chest measurement, and average annual rainfall.