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

dollars inaccessible in their town. So one day when old man Dwelley was there they fined him one thousand five hundred dollars for killing a elk out of season, or something. That made him mad. Still and all, he had his twelve thousand dollars left, not mentioning what he got for his beaver hides.

“One thing with another,” continued Maw after a period of rumination, “you can't say but what this park is a fine place. Of course there's always a wonder in my mind where they get all the hot water for the geysers. It looks to me like a industrial waste. If the geysers could be used for laundries, that would be something like. Then, again, they're all the same color. If they'd throw in some bluing now and then, or some red or green, they'd look prettier—that'd give more variety, like. Yet they say these geysers has been running for years and no let-up. Ain't it funny the things you see, away from home?

“If the geysers could be used for laundries, that would be something like.”—Maw—p. 48

“I like to ride along these roads up in the mountains, and look down at the rivers. You get way up above a river and it looks like a long washboard, down below, here in the mountains. And I'll have to say the roads is crooked. I say to Paw: 'We're all church members except Cynthy, which went to college, and if we go we go.' And even if we do—why, we've all had a vacation, and I'll tell it to the world that a vacation trip once in a lifetime is something no family ought to be without, no matter what the preacher says about idleness. I'm strong for vacations from this time on. Fact is, I believe Paw and me has got to have them, though this is our first. And to think we was afraid to buy ice cream once, except on the Fourth of July! Now, Paw goes right up to one of them stands and buys five dollars of gasoline like it was nothing. Times has changed, like I said. Lookit at our car now. I can remember back—not so far, neither—when if I got a ride in a side-bar buggy I thought I was a mighty lucky girl. And here we are, traveling with every sort of comfort anybody could ask.”

There were many appliances which Maw gradually had installed for facilitating housekeeping in her day-to-day camps—folding beds, a cracker-box pantry, a planed board for table, racks for groceries and the like, all strung alongside the car, so numerous and extensive that by the time the Hickory Bend Outing Club's great wall tent had been added you barely could see the wheels underneath the moving mass. From the midst of all projected the steering wheel, which Paw grasped as he sat, with only the top of his hat visible to the naked eye. Maw rode beside him somewhere. I never was able satisfactorily to determine where Cynthy, Hattie and Rowena rode. Danny, the family dog, had his seat outside on the fender, against the hood. I presume Danny's feet got hot sometimes on the up grades, but Maw said he ought to be used to it by now.

All Ready for Bud

On top of the load, with the stock projecting well forward, I quite often was able to recognize old Suse, the ancient firearm of geyserlike proclivities. Maw said she always felt more comfortable when there was a gun round, because she never could get used to bears, no matter how afraid they was of folks.

“When we come out here we didn't know but what we could get a shot on the quiet at a buffalo, Paw never having killed one in his life. Plenty people believes the same till they get here. When we was at the ranger station we seen one Arkansas car come in with six shooting irons, and they all made a kick about having their guns locked up. Then there was a deputy sheriff from Arizony, with woolly pants on, and he made a holler about them locking up his six-shooter. 'This here may cost me my life,' said he to the ranger. 'I dunno for sure that Bud Cottrell is in this here park, but he might be; and if I should run across him I serve notice on you right now I'm going to bust this seal.'

“'My!' says the ranger to this Arizony man, 'you look to me like a sort of ferocious person. Have you killed many people?'

“That sort of quieted him down. 'Well, no,' says he, 'I ain't never killed nobody, but I've saw it did, and if I ever meet Bud Cottrell I shore am going to bust this seal.' I ain't ever heard whether he busted it or not.”

“Funniest thing to me about this here park,” commented Paw, “is that they call me a sagebrusher and the people at the hotels dudes. And the girls in the hotel dining rooms they call savages, though some of them wears specs, and most of them is school-teachers, with a few stenographers throwed in. Why they should call them people savages is what I can't understand. And what do they mean by dude wrangling, mister?”

I explained to Paw that this was a new industry recently sprung up in the West, among those residents of adjacent states who take out camping and hunting parties, or even such persons as desire to see mountain scenery and the footprints of large game, formerly embedded in the soil and now protected by log parapets.

“So that's what it is,” nodded Maw as I gave this information. “I suppose it's just part of the funny things that happens back here. Such things as a person does see on a vacation! Don't it beat all? Now I caught Hattie walking off towards the electric light last night with a young man that had specs and leather leggins like the officers has, and I declare if she didn't tell me he was a perfessor of geology down at Salt Lake or Omaha. Once I give a quarter for a tip to a man that brought me some gasoline, and I declare if I didn't find out he teaches law in a university somewheres! Then, they tell me that the young man who peels potatoes in the kitchen back of our camp has only one more year to get through Princeton—whoever Princeton is. I wish he was through now, because he sings things.

“We're making quite a stay here in the park—longer than what we allowed we would do, Paw and me. The girls seem to be having a sort of good time here, one thing with another. You can't leave a girl alone anywheres here, unless she's taken in by some perfessor or ranger or guide or cook or chauffeur or something, who comes along and carries her off to show her the bears or Old Faithful or Inspiration Point or something. Seems to me like we've heard them words before, too—and then there's Lovers' Leap and the Devil's Slide. We've even got them in Ioway, where the hills is rough.

“Set down on the log here,” said Maw, “and rest yourself, and I'll build up the fire. Ain't it fine outdoors? I declare, I let out my corsets four inches above and below, I breathe that much deeper here in the mountains; and the air makes you feel so fine. What was I saying?—oh, about my knitting. You see at home, when I get my work done, I knit or crochet or embroider. Mary's baby is a right cute little thing, and I like to sew or knit things anyways. But Joseph said to me: 'Now, Maw! Now you forget it; we're going to have a vacation now, with no work at all for no one at all, and all strings off. We're just going to have one mighty good time,' says Joseph to me. At first, having nothing to do, I felt right strange, but I'm getting used to it now, though I do think I could knit comfortable while setting watching the geysers spout.

“I dunno how we happened to come out so far as this—we didn't allow to spend over two hundred dollars, but I allow we've spent over five hundred or six hundred dollars now. The funny thing is, Paw don't seem to care. He always was aggressive. He just driv right on West till we got here. He said his Paw traveled across all that country in a ox team, and he allowed he could in a automobile. So we done it, and here we are. I don't care if we don't get home till after harvest.”

Many and many a talk I had with Maw, dear old Maw, some sixty thousand of her, this past summer. The best of all vacations is to see someone else having a vacation who never has had a vacation before in his or her life. The delight of Maw in this new phase of her existence has been my main delight for many a week in the months spent, not so much in watching geysers as in watching Maw. Sometimes I steal away from the pleadings of the saxophone, leaving even Stella O'Cleave with the slumberous eyes sitting alone at the log rail of Old Faithful Inn. I want to see Maw once more, and talk with her once again about the virtues of a vacation now and again; at least once in a lifetime spent in work for others.

I do not always find the girls at home in the camp. For some reason they seem of late to be out later and later of evenings. Paw has found a crony here and there about the camps, and swaps reminiscences of this sort or that. Sometimes I find Maw alone, sitting on the log, gazing into her little camp fire. Once, I recall, one of the girls was at home.

“Roweny!” called out Maw suddenly. “Roweny, where are you? Come and talk to the gentleman.”

A voice replied from the other side of the car, where Rowena was sitting on the running board. I discovered her, chin in hand, looking out into the dark.

“I was afraid some perfessor had got her,” explained Maw to me. “Come on out, Roweny, and set by the fire. This gentleman seems sort of nice, and he's old.”

Rowena, seventeen years of age, uncrossed her long young limbs and came out of the darkness, seating herself on the running board on our side, where the firelight shone on her clean young features, her splendid young figure of an American girl. She was comely enough in her spiral putties and her tanned boots as she sat, her small round chin on the hand whose arm was supported by a knee. Rowena appeared downcast. While Maw was busy a moment later, I asked her why.

I think it must have been the mountain moon again; for Rowena, seventeen years of age, once more looked gloomily out into the night.

“If I thought I could ever find a man that would understand me I believe I would marry him!” said she, as has every young girl in her time.

“Tut, tut! Rowena!” I replied. “I believe that I understand you, simple as I am myself, and you need not marry me at all. I understand you perfectly. You are just a fine young girl, out on almost your first vacation, with your Maw. It is the moon, Rowena. It is youth, Rowena, and the air of the hills. Believe me, it will all come right when the cook has finished his Princeton; of that I am sure.

“And Rowena,” I added, “you will grow up after a while—you will grow