“The safest thing you could do is to doubt them geysers,” interrupted her husband, who overheard her. “I was walking round on them just the other day, right where signs said 'Dangerous.' It didn't seem to me there was no danger at all, for nothing was happening. But one of them rangers come up to me and asked if I didn't see the sign. 'That's all right, brother,' says I. 'I've tried this place and it's all right.' And right then she went off.”
“And you should have seen Paw come down off from there,” commented his spouse. “I didn't know he could run that fast, his time of life.”
“If they let me have my gun,” said Paw, uncrossing one leg from the other, “I could mighty soon get me a pair of elk horns for myself. But what can a fellow do when they tie his gun up, time he comes in the park?”
“You ain't maybe noticed that hole in the back end of our car,” explained Maw to me, pointing to an aperture in the curtain which looked as though a cat had been thrown through it with claws extended. “Tell him about it Paw.”
Spontaneous Eruption
“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.”