“Can’t you answer a civil question?” Westy asked, the least bit testily.
“Things have to be civil to suit you, hey?” the traveling man said. “Anything uncivilized: and——”
“We’re asking you if it’s true that there are train robbers and men like that in the park?” Westy said.
“Sure there are,” said the stranger. “Where do you suppose they buy their post cards to send home?”
The three boys seemed on the point of giving him up as a hopeless case.
“Why? Do you want to go hunting them?” the stranger asked.
“We wouldn’t be the first boy scouts to help the authorities,” Warde said.
This seemed to amuse the traveling man greatly. He contemplated the three of them with a kind of good-humored, sneering skepticism. Then he was moved to be serious.
“Well, I’ll tell you how it is,” he said. “The Yellowstone Park is really two places; see? There’s the wild Yellowstone and the tame Yellowstone. 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 geyser in the back yard—spurts once an hour, Johnny on the spot. I suppose,” added the stranger 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.”