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 Canon. 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 Canon 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 Canon 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 Canon. "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