Maw's Vacation The Story of a Human Being in the Yellowstone
he cannot answer—except perhaps my favorite question: “Why do they have this curio junk in all the park stores—moccasins, leather Indian heads, and all that sort of thing?” He sobbed when I asked him that, but I thought I could hear some muttered word about there being a popular demand. As for me, I hold with Maw that, if a person is being bitten on the elbow, better a bottle of marmalade, a loaf of bread or a bottle of mosquito dope than a pair of beef-hide moccasins with puckered toes. In my belief a few paintings by Mr. Thomas Moran at a cost of fifteen thousand or twenty thousand

   dollars, or sets of the works of some of our more popular authors, with flexible backs, would be far more appropriate in the curio stores.

   Maw is of the opinion that most of the merchants, storekeepers and venders of commodities west of the Mississippi River are robbers. “Not that I mean real robbers like used to hold up the stagecoaches here in the park,” she explained. “They don't do that no more since the cars has come—I suppose because they go so fast that it ain't convenient for robbers no more. But in the old times, they tell me, when they run stagecoaches in here, and didn't have no railroad in on the west side, there used to be a regular business of holding up the stagecoaches right over where old man Dwelley used to have his eating house for lunch. There's a clubhouse there now, instead of his old eating house, they say. I heard that when they wanted to buy old man Dwelley out for a club and asked him how much he wanted, he

   thought a while, and then did some counting, and then allowed that about twelve thousand dollars would be about right. The man that was buying the place, he set down and writ a check right then for twelve thousand dollars. But old man Dwelley didn't take it. 'I dunno what that thing is,' says he. 'When I say twelve thousand dollars I mean twelve thousand dollars in real money.'”

     T

    hey

   told him he had for to wait a few days and they went over to Livingston and got twelve thousand dollars in five-dollar bills, and brung it to Dwelley, and told him to count it. He counted a little of it, and then said it was all right; he'd take their word for it that there was twelve thousand dollars there. So then he put it in a sack where he had some beaver hides. They told me he sent it all by express to a fur buyer in Salt Lake after a while, and told him to put it in a bank. He had one thousand five hundred dollars saved out, so they told me, and he put that in the bank 
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