Ajax, for Example

Ajax Ulysses Green, Ph.D., has never once been outdoors. Armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of Latin and a complete inability to saddle a horse, he arrives at the scrubby cabin of Magpie Simpkins and Ike Harper bent on studying the effects of astragalas splendens on sheep. What follows is a collision between theory and terrain, between footnotes and frontier. The locals don't know what to make of this strange creature who speaks in polysyllables and can't tell a goat from a sheep. Ajax wanders into a fight with a sheep herder he mistakes for a philosophical adversary. He steals a goat while attempting to conduct field research. He is simultaneously the most educated man in the room and the most useless. Yet there's tenderness beneath the satire. Magpie and Ike, for all their mocking, become grudgingly fond of this impossible man. Tuttle's comedy cuts both ways: the educated appear foolish, but so do the roughnecks who dismiss what they cannot understand. A gem of American humor from the 1920s, sharp enough to still draw blood.