"At this, Johnny passes his 'father' over a double handful of black
pepper before it's ground.

"'Let my father get away with that,' says Johnny, 'an' he'll feel
like a bird. It will make him gay an' full of p'isen, like a
rattlesnake in August.'

"Out to the r'ar of Johnny's store is piled up onder a shed more'n
two thousand boxes of axle grease. It was sent into the nation
consigned to Johnny by some ill-advised sports in New York, who
figgers that because the Osages as a tribe abounds in wagons, thar
must shorely be a market for axle grease. That's where them New York
persons misses the ford a lot. Them savages has wagons, troo; but
they no more thinks of greasin' them axles than paintin' the runnin'
gear. They never goes ag'inst that axle grease game for so much as a
single box; said ointment is a drug. When he don't dispose of it
none, Johnny stores it out onder a shed some twenty rods away, an'
regyards it as a total loss.

"'Axle grease,' says Johnny, 'makes a p'int in civilization to which
the savage has not yet clambered, an' them optimists, East, who
sends it on yere, should have never made no sech break.'

"Mebby it's because this axle grease grows sullen an' feels
neglected that a-way; mebby it's the heats of two summers an' the
frosts of two winters which sp'iles its disp'sition; shore it is at
any rate that at the time I'm thar, that onguent seems fretted to
the core, an' is givin' forth a protestin' fragrance that has stood
off a coyote an' made him quit at a distance of two hundred yards.