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.”