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East Coast say. Skunk eggs?
    Skunk eggs? Oh, that’s onions. The humor of the Old West takes forms both benign and bawdy. (For THE MESA LARGO TOURIST EXPEDITION, expect the benign!)
    And our erstwhile songster, Jose Hombre Mendez will be leading you in cowboy songs around the campfire before bedtime. You cowboys and cowgirls belt it out and then when you hit the hay, sleep tight. Our first day on the trail will be the beginning of
a trip you will never forget!!! . . .

BUMPY
    We were at supper. That’s me, Mr. Copeland, Mrs. Copeland, Sister, Brother, Grandma Copeland, and Star. Star just got hereand is more or less pretty. She got sent out here after her mama, who was some kin to Mr. Copeland, died, and she’ll be living in the knoll cabin between here and the Merriwether Ranch if she decides to stay. Mrs. Copeland and her is fixing it up. I’m going up there one night and see can I see her undress.
    We was sitting at the big round table eating chicken and dumplings and peas and sallet and drinking coffee, except for Brother, Sister, and Star, who was all drinking buttermilk.
    About Grandma Copeland. I call her Grandma, too. In the daytime she stays in the rolling chair Mr. Copeland made because they cost so much where you order them from. He made her a real pretty one out of hickory and black birch, and then he made another one for Mr. Clark, who used to run the newspaper, but he died, and they give it to a woman that lived next to him.
    Mr. Copeland says Grandma Copeland don’t talk since she got sick from the fevers on the trip when they come out here a long time ago. They come by wagon before Brother and Sister was born because by train costed too much.
    Grandma Copeland’s got three bonnets. A red, a white, and a blue with white dots, and she was way back down there in the blue one, and way down in her rolling chair that was rolled up to the supper table. She’s so little Mrs. Copeland puts a tray in front of her and they put her food on that. She eats a lot of stuff with her hands. Mr. Copeland said she’s got so little that if she’s in a stiff-ironed dress she can lean back or forward in her chair and the dress don’t move.
    Sometimes she gets to laughing and can’t stop, especiallywhen Mr. Copeland picks her up and puts her in the bed, or sometimes when she’s just sitting by herself, she’ll start up. She ain’t got no teeth, so if we’re eating tough meat, Mr. Copeland chews it up for her.
    Then too, Mr. Copeland made this frame for her what looks like a little fence that fits in holes in the floor in the summer kitchen in front of the cookstove. When the garden starts coming in, Mr. Copeland or Mrs. Copeland gets her up in that frame and ties her in it and she stands right there and cooks away like nobody’s business. She cans stuff, too. “That woman’s a cooking fool,” Mr. Copeland says. “And eats like a horse.”
    So, at supper, Mr. Copeland told us about planning to move Grandma Copeland’s room because of the mortuary science room out there in the kitchen. “I’m gone add a room onto the south side the house and put a little porch on it for Grandma. Wouldn’t you like that, Grandma? Then we wouldn’t have to roll you back and forth so much.”
    Grandma just looks at him, chewing—or gumming—which swings around a couple of mole hairs on her chin, like cat’s whiskers. Then she takes a drink of her jelly water.
    â€œBlankenship thinks it’ll be a good business in about two year,” Mr. Copeland says. “Real good in five.”
    It gets quiet again.
    â€œI don’t think people are going to change their ways on something like that,” says Mrs. Copeland. She spoons peas onto Grandma’s plate.
    â€œThey’re changing them in Denver,” says Mr. Copeland.
    â€œDenver is such an exciting place,” says Star. She is pretty but she don’t know nothing much