Maw's Vacation by Emerson Hough (free e novels TXT) 📕

“I think old Suse must have got some sort of examples from these geysers. I just throwed her in back of the car, on top of the bed clothes, pointing back behind where the girls was setting. All at once, several hours later, without no warning, she just erupted. There's something eruptious in the air up here I guess.”

“And they do the funniest things,” nodded Maw. “I was saying I thought this park wasn't practical, but some ways I believe it is. For instance, they told me about how when they was making the new road from the Lake Hotel over to the Canyon the engineer run the line in the winter time, and it run right over on top a grave, where a man was buried. There was a headstone there, but the snow was so deep the engineer didn't see it. Come spring, the road crew graded the road right through, grave and all. When the superintendent heard of that he come down and complained about it.

“'Now,' says he, 'you've gone built that expensive road right over that feller, and we've got to take him up and move him.' There was an Irish foreman that had run the road crew, and he reasons thoughtful for a while, and then he says to the superintendent, says he: 'Why can't we just move the headstone and leave him where he's at?' So they done that, and everybody is perfectly contented, his widow and all. What I don't see is why don't the yellow cars stop there and point out that for a point of interest? But they don't. I believe I'll speak to the superintendent about that.”

As to the latter personage mentioned by my friends, one must search far to find a more long-suffering man. As a boy the superintendent was wild, and during a moment of unrestraint he slew his Sabbath-school teacher while yet a youth. The judge, in sentencing him, said that hanging would not be severe enough, so he condemned him to a life as superintendent of a national park—a sentence barely constitutional.

The park superintendent is a study in natural history. During the open season on superintendents, some three months in duration, he does not sleep at all. For one month after the first snowfall he digs a hole beneath a rock, somewhere above timberline, and falls into a torpor, using no food for thirty days. Then he goes to Washington to meet the Director of Parks, after which he gets no more sleep until next fall. It is this perpetual insomnia which gives a park superintendent his haunted look. He knows he ought not to have killed his teacher, so he suffers in silence.

When the superintendent comes down to his office in the morning Maw is sitting on the front steps, sixty thousand of her. She has not got that letter with the money in it yet; and it's such things as that which keeps people away from the parks. And what has become of her dog? He was right in the car last night and he never harmed nobody in his life and wouldn't bite nobody's bears if left alone. And what can folks do when it rains this way and the roads so slippy? And about that man on the truck that sassed us the other day? And about the price of gas—how can folks afford it even if they only need two gallons to get to the railroad? And if I couldn't make better soup than they serve at the camps I'd resign from the church. And how far is it to Norris Geyser Basin and why do they call it a basin and who was Mr. Norris and do they name all the things after people and why not name something after Congressman Smith or the editor of some Montana paper and what's the reason people have to pay to ride in the parks anyways and why can't we bottle Apollinaris Spring and would some salts help the Iron Spring and what makes the pelican's mouth so funny that way and do they eat fish and is there any swans on Swan Lake Flats and which way is the garage and is there church on Sundays and who preaches and why don't they have a Presbyterian and is that map up to date and are you a married man and how many people does it take to run the park and how much do the hotels make and why is the owner of the camps always in such a hurry to get away when you want to talk with him and who is the man who drives the sprinkler wagon with specs and can you get pictures cheaper if you take say a dozen and why can't everybody sell pictures and run hotels—we could take them right with our Kapoks anyways—and is there a place where you can get some writing paper and an envelope and do you write all your own letters yourself but of course how could a stenographer stand the altitude? Why, I get out of breath sometimes.

I think Maw, sixty thousand of her, does sometimes get out of breath, but not often and not for long. The superintendent, contrite because of his past, is patient when he replies.

“Dear madam,” he begins, the tips of his fingers together as he sits back in his chair, “your inquiry regarding this national park is noted, and in reply I beg to state that I will answer all your questions after I have told the rangers where to let the hotels cut wood and where to run their milk herd and how to feed the hay crews and where to send the road crews and where to have the gravel crews sleep and where to get four more good trucks and two more garage men and a steno and a new man on the files and look after the Appropriations Committee and write my annual report to the Secretary of the Interior and my weekly report to the Director of the Parks and my daily report for the records and my personal correspondence and see where the automobile blanks all have gone and get the daily total of visitors classified and find a new site for a camp and lay out twelve miles of new road and have the garbage moved and get the elk counted again and the antelope estimated and stop the sale of elk teeth and investigate the reasons why the bears don't come in and look at a sick lady at the Fountain and wire the Shriners that I will meet them at the train and write Congressman Jones that his trip is all arranged for and pick out a camp site for the director's Chicago friends and make my daily drive of five hundred miles round the park to see if they haven't carried off the mountains and tell the United States commissioner to soak that party who wrote six names on the Castle Geyser and get in oats for the road teams and take up the topographic maps with the U. S. engineers and send some photos to twelve magazines and arrange for the last movie man to photograph the bears and see about some colored prints of Old Faithful and have the bridal chambers of the hotel renovated for the party of New York editors and get a new collar for my wife's dog, and explain why there are so many mosquitoes this year even under a Republican Administration—and a lot more things that are on the daily tickler pad. Then I have to keep my personal books and write my longhand letters until after midnight and read up some more of the geology of the park and the times of intermission for the geysers and the altitudes of all the peaks and learn the personal names of all the geysers and woodchucks and——”

“That man wasn't right polite to me,” said Maw in commenting upon some of this. “He told me he was busy. I'd like to know what he's got to do, just setting round.”

Myself, I sometimes think the punishment of the superintendent is almost too severe. He is obliged, for instance, to know everything in the world that everyone else in the world does not know. He has pictures and exact measurements of all the game animals in the park, all the flowers, knows all the colors of the Grand Canyon and the location of every sprinkling hose in fifty square miles. I have never been able to ask him any questions that he cannot answer—except perhaps my favorite question: “Why do they have this curio junk in all the park stores—moccasins, leather Indian heads, and all that sort of thing?” He sobbed when I asked him that, but I thought I could hear some muttered word about there being a popular demand. As for me, I hold with Maw that, if a person is being bitten on the elbow, better a bottle of marmalade, a loaf of bread or a bottle of mosquito dope than a pair of beef-hide moccasins with puckered toes. In my belief a few paintings by Mr. Thomas Moran at a cost of fifteen thousand or twenty thousand dollars, or sets of the works of some of our more popular authors, with flexible backs, would be far more appropriate in the curio stores.

Maw is of the opinion that most of the merchants, storekeepers and venders of commodities west of the Mississippi River are robbers. “Not that I mean real robbers like used to hold up the stagecoaches here in the park,” she explained. “They don't do that no more since the cars has come—I suppose because they go so fast that it ain't convenient for robbers no more. But in the old times, they tell me, when they run stagecoaches in here, and didn't have no railroad in on the west side, there used to be a regular business of holding up the stagecoaches right over where old man Dwelley used to have his eating house for lunch. There's a clubhouse there now, instead of his old eating house, they say. I heard that when they wanted to buy old man Dwelley out for a club and asked him how much he wanted, he thought a while, and then did some counting, and then allowed that about twelve thousand dollars would be about right. The man that was buying the place, he set down and writ a check right then for twelve thousand dollars. But old man Dwelley didn't take it. 'I dunno what that thing is,' says he. 'When I say twelve thousand dollars I mean twelve thousand dollars in real money.'”

They told him he had for to wait a few days and they went over to Livingston and got twelve thousand dollars in five-dollar bills, and brung it to Dwelley, and told him to count it. He counted a little of it, and then said it was all right; he'd take their word for it that there was twelve thousand dollars there. So then he put it in a sack where he had some beaver hides. They told me he sent it all by express to a fur buyer in Salt Lake after a while, and told him to put it in a bank. He had one thousand five hundred dollars saved out, so they told me, and he put that in the bank over to Bozeman. It riled them people at Bozeman a good deal to think that anybody not from Bozeman should have one thousand five hundred