The same week there arrived a party of six or eight Easterners who yearned to see some of those real genuine Wild Western characters such as they had met so often in a film. The manager trotted out a troupe of trail guides for them—all ex-cowboys; but they, being merely half a dozen sunburned, quiet youths in overalls, did not fill the bill at all. The manager hated to have his guests depart disappointed. Privately he called his room clerk aside and told him the situation and the room clerk offered to oblige.
The room clerk had come from Ohio two years before and was a mighty accommodating young fellow. He slipped across to the curio store and put on a big hat and some large silver spurs and a pair of leather chaps made by one of the most reliable mail-order houses in this country. Thus caparisoned, he mounted a pony and came charging across the lawn, uttering wild ki-yis and quirting his mount at every jump. He steered right up the steps to the porch where the delighted Easterners were assembled, and then he yanked the pony back on his haunches and held him there with one hand while with the other he rolled a brown-paper cigarette—which was a trick he had learned in a high-school frat at Cincinnati—and altogether he was the picture of a regular moving-picture cowboy and gave general satisfaction.
If the cowboys are disappointing in their outward aspect, however, Captain Jim Hance is not. The captain is the official prevaricator of the Grand Cañon. It is probably the only salaried job of the sort in the world—his competitors in the same line of business mainly work for the love of it. He is a venerable retired prospector who is specially retained by the Santa Fe road for the sole purpose of stuffing the casual tourist with the kind of fiction the casual tourist's system seems to crave. He just moons round from spot to spot, romancing as he goes.
Two of the captain's standbys have been advertised to the world. One of them deals with the sad fate of his bride, who on her honeymoon fell off into the Cañon and lodged on a rim three hundred feet below. "I was two days gettin' down to the poor little thing," he tells you, "and then I seen both her hind legs was broke." Here the captain invariably pauses and looks out musingly across the Cañon until the victim bites with an impatient "What happened then?" "Oh, I knew she wouldn't be no use to me any more as a bride—so I shot her!" The other tale he saves up until some tenderfoot notices the succession of blazes upon the treetrunks along one of the forest trails and wants to know what made those peculiar marks upon the bark all at the same height from the earth. Captain Hance explains that he himself did it—with his elbows and knees—while fleeing from a war party of Apaches.
His newest one, though—the one he is featuring this year—is, in the opinion of competent judges, the gem of the Hance collection. It concerns the fate of one Total Loss Watkins, an old and devoted friend of the captain. As a preliminary he leads a group of wide-eared, doe-eyed victims to the rim of the Cañon. "Right here," he says sorrowfully, "was where poor old Total slipped off one day. It's two thousand feet to the first ledge and we thought he was a gone fawnskin, sure! But he had on rubber boots, and he had the presence of mind to light standing up. He bounced up and down for two days and nights without stoppin', and then we had to get a wingshot to kill him in order to keep him from starvin' to death."
The next stop will be Southern California, the Land of Perpetual Sunshine—except when it rains!