MR. WILDE HOLDS FORTH
Indeed the three boys seemed on the point of giving Mr. Wilde up for a
hopeless case.
“Why? Do you want to go hunting train robbers?” the exasperating
stranger asked.
“Well,” said Westy, rather disgusted, “we wouldn’t be the first boy
scouts to help the authorities. Some boy scouts in Philadelphia helped
catch a highway robber.”
This seemed greatly to amuse Mr. Wilde. He screwed his cigar over from
one corner of his mouth to the other and looked at the boys
good-naturedly, but seriously.
“Well, I’ll tell you just how it is,” he said. “There are really two
Yellowstone Parks. There’s the Yellowstone Park where you go, and
there’s the Yellowstone Park where I go. There’s the tame Yellowstone
Park and the wild Yellowstone Park.
“The park is full of grizzlies and rough characters of the wild and
fuzzy West, but they don’t patronize the sightseeing autos. They’re kind
of modest and diffident and they stay back in the mountains where you
won’t see them. You know train robbers as a rule are sort of bashful.
You kids are just going to see the park, and you’ll have your hands
full, too. You’ll sit in a nice comfortable automobile and the man will
tell you what to look at and you’ll see geysers and things and canyons
and a lot of odds and ends and you’ll have the time of your lives.
There’s a picture shop between Norris and the Canyon; you drop in there
and see if you can get a post card showing Pelican Cone. That’ll give
you an idea of where I’ll be. You can think of me up in the wilderness
while you’re listening to the concert in the Old Faithful Inn. That’s
where they have the big geezer in the back yard—spurts once an hour,
Johnny on the spot. I suppose,” he added with that shrewd, skeptical
look which was beginning to tell on the boys, “that if you kids really
saw a grizzly you wouldn’t stop running till you hit New York. I think
you said scouts know how to run.”
“We wouldn’t stop there,” said the Carlyle boy. “We’d be so scared that
we’d just take a running jump across the Atlantic Ocean and land in
Europe.”
“What would you really do now if you met a bandit?” Mr. Wilde asked.
“_Shoot him dead_, I suppose, like Deadwood Dick in the dime novels.”
“We don’t read dime novels,” said Westy.
“But just the same,” said Warde, “it might be the worse for that bandit.
Didn’t you read——”
Mr. Wilde laughed heartily.
“All right, you can laugh,” said Westy, a trifle annoyed.
Mr. Wilde stuck his feet up between Warde and Westy, who sat in the seat
facing him, and put his arm on the farther shoulder of Eddie Carlyle,
who sat beside him. Then he worked the unlighted cigar across his mouth
and tilted it at an angle which somehow seemed to bespeak a good-natured
contempt of Boy Scouts.
“Just between ourselves,” said he, “who takes care of the publicity
stuff for the Boy Scouts anyway? I read about one kid who found a German
wireless station during the war——”
“That was true,” snapped Warde, stung into some show of real anger by
this flippant slander.
“I suppose you don’t know that a scout out west in Illinois——”
“You mean out _east_ in Illinois,” laughed Mr. Wilde. “You’re in the
wild and woolly West and you don’t even know it. I suppose if you were
dropped from the train right now you’d start west for Chicago.”
The three boys laughed, for it did seem funny to think of Illinois being
far east of them. They felt a bit chagrined too at the realization that
after all their view of the rugged wonders they were approaching was to
be enjoyed from the rather prosaic vantage point of a sightseeing auto.
What would Buffalo Bill or Kit Carson have said to that?
Mr. Wilde looked out of the window and said, “We’ll hit Emigrant pretty
soon if it’s still there. The cyclones out here blow the villages around
so half the time the engineer don’t know where to look for them. I
remember Barker’s Corners used to be right behind a big tree in Montana
and it got blown away and they found it two years afterward in Arizona.”