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a man's voice (a clear, strong, friendly voice) coming out of his dog-face.
The Friendly Giant had a mill and he ground grain for everybody who
brought it. Like all millers, he took one tenth of the grain in fee for the
grinding. And yet the nine-tenths of the grain that he returned ground and
sacked to the customer was always of greater quantity and greater weight than
had been the ten-tenths that the customer had originally brought to him. And
he gave to the poor one-tenth amount of every grinding that he had kept from
the customer.
The Giant had a hotel or roadside inn at the place called Talking Rocks
in Stone County, Missouri. He was the patron of travelers, so he welcomed
travelers of every sort at his hotel and offered the best bed-and -board
anywhere. When travelers left him, they paid whatever they could afford. And
they always found twice the amount of their payment back in their pockets
after they were a mile or so down the road.
Everybody liked him except those animals, the coons, badgers, and
wolverines, those animals that traditionally hate and fear dogs. Then there
appeared a wolverine of genius in the neighborhood. In every species, whether
wolverine or human or other, about one individual in five million will be an
individual of genius. The gifted wolverine got about a hundred other
wolverines to assemble. He had to be a genius because the slashing solitary
wolverines are lone hunters who hate other wolverines only slightly less than
they hate creatures of other species. But he assembled them.
The mob of savage wolverines ambushed the good giant Horace Goodjohn
Christopher one night. They killed him, and they tore his hot flesh right off
his bones and ate it completely.
Well, was the giant Horace Goodjohn Christopher the same person as the
giant Saint Christopher of Chanaan? His age of seventeen-hundred-and-fifty
years would fit just about right. And the mystery of the old faceless statues
of Saint Christopher might have been that they were dog-faced statues, and
persons might have felt that it was not fitting that a saint should be
represented as dog-faced even if it was accurate.
And two days after the death of Horace Goodjohn Christopher, there came
further corroborations that he was indeed the same person as ancient Saint
Christopher of Chanaan. A man came in a truck to the Talking Rocks site in
Stone County.
"I travel for the Zolliger Church Goods Company," he said. "If nobody
objects, l will take the holy bones of Saint Christopher with me. It isn't
seemly that they should lie here in the dank ground and be gnawed on by every
animal that comes along. How many thousand of holy relics will they make'. A
thousand sizable places could be made from just one of those giant tibia
bones."
"How do you know that they are really the bones of Saint Christopher?"
someone asked him.
"Gentlemen, relics authenticate themselves," the church goods man said.
"And two nights ago, when I was in a hotel in Jefferson City, I dreamed that
the holy bones of the good giant Saint Christopher could be found in this
exact spot. I came here and found it to be so."
I myself visited this church goods man, saw the bones and the relics
that he was making from them, and was convinced of their authenticity. He even
offered me a job selling them. "You are a charming man," he said, "and I
believe that you could sell anything." There would be an incredible manner of
relics made from those bones, and one man could not sell them all. But so far
I have not taken the job.
By John T. Woolybear in the Sunday Magazine Section of the Saint Louis
Globe, not too many years ago.
"This is the last thing I can every buy from you, John," the Magazine
Section editor of the Globe told John Woolybear. "Were I not retiring at the
end of this month I would not dare to buy and publish this. It's outrageous,
of course, it's silly, it's garish."
"But a Magazine Section piece cannot be too garish!" John Woolybear
protested. "Everybody knows that."
"Maybe everybody knew it fifty years ago, John," the editor said, "but
it hasn't been true for a long time. This is the most inept and outrageous
thing that I have ever encountered. But it served my purpose. What better way
to thumb my nose at the powers at this newspaper where 1 have spent so many
happy years! What a flood of protests they'll get when this silly thing
appears!"
John T. Woolybear took his money and left the newspaper office with a
touch of sorrow in his heart. Was it possible that the world was in the
process of passing him by? Was flamboyance and garishness no longer wanted in
the world? Could it be that even a true account like this one of the good
giant at Talking Rocks was too garish and incredible to appear in a Sunday
Magazine Section of a Newspaper?
Woolybear felt bewildered. And in his bewilderment he experienced a
sudden loneliness for his three wives, the one in Illinois, the one in
Nebraska, and the one in Texas.
4.
STRANGE ACCOUNT OF THE PIKE COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA CLONINGS
In the hamlet of Greely Gulch in Pike County, Pennsylvania, there are
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