"Well, I dunno as it's much to tell," said that gentleman, somewhat
crestfallen. "This here old musket of mine is the hardest shooting gun
in our country. I've kilt me a goose with it many a time, at a hundred
yards. She's a Harper's Ferry musket that done good service in the Civil
War. She's been hanging in my room, loaded, for three or four years, I
reckon, and when I told the ranger man, coming in, that she was loaded
he says: 'You can't take no loaded gun through the park. We'll have to
shoot her off before you can go in the park.' So we took old Suse round
behind the house, and snaps six or eight caps on her, but she didn't go
off. Finally the ranger allowed that that gun was perfectly safe, and
they let me bring her on in, of course, having wired up the working end.
"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.