THE CAVE OF THE DINOSAUR
It had been arranged with the Chief that the girls were to wait at the
Crossbar until they heard from him, and not attempt making the trip over
to the gulch unless they were sure he and the Doctor would be there to
meet them.
It was hard being patient, but after their morning dip down at the
swimming place, Jean kept them busy getting the sheep wagon ready for
the camping trip. They took clean papers, and tacked them evenly inside
the cupboards and lockers under the seats, and made a regular inventory
of everything they would need. Ruth took charge of this, and would check
off each article as it went into the wagon.
The heavy things, such as tents, bedding, cooking utensils, and so on,
were to follow in what Don called the grub wagon.
Sally Lost Moon was to stay at the ranch and do the cooking and
housework for the boys, and it had been decided to let the girls ride
their ponies. When one of them grew tired, she could ride in the wagon.
The girls were delighted at this prospect. Of all the outdoor pleasures
they had enjoyed at the ranch, the riding came first of all. There was
something so exhilarating and healthful about it. The trouting was good
sport and plenty of fun, and the long tramps they took nearly every day
out to the Indian graves, or over old Topnotch’s twisted trails, or far
down along the river to the lower rapids, each held a special enjoyment
all its own, but there was something so novel and exciting about the
pony riding that it excelled all other sports.
Polly had been delighted too, the first time that Jinks whinnied to her,
and showed plainly he felt on friendly terms. By the third week, all of
the ponies were quite willing to respond to the petting and overtures of
friendship that had been lavished on them.
“I do really believe they all know us by now,” Ted had declared, that
morning. “Don let me help rub Shoofly down yesterday morning, and he
understood everything I said to him.”
“Who, Don?” queried Sue, in a muffled tone, as she knelt by a locker,
and dug down under towels and mosquito netting to be sure that she had
not packed the kodak at the very bottom.
“No, goose. The pony. I wish I could take him back home. I shall miss
him so, and the riding, and oh—I don’t know what to call it—the wideness
of everything.”
“Glorious expanse, she means, Sue,” Isabel explained. “Where did you
pack my hand mirror?”
“It is not packed, Lady Vanitas,” retorted Sue, firmly. “We are to wash
at pools and river brinks, and other handy wet spots en route, and
you’ll just have to peek over at yourself like Narcissus when you want
to see how you look.”
“Don’t you worry, Isabel,” Polly called cheerily. “I saw Peggie drop a
three-cornered looking glass in the box with the dishes. We’ll nail it
up on a tree. Oh, girls, I wish we had some lightweight rifles, not to
shoot with—”
“Not shoot with?” repeated Ted, indignantly. “For what, then?”
“Practice and defence,” replied Polly. “We won’t want to stay around the
camp every minute, and if we stray off any distance, some wild animal
might appear, and where would we be?”
“‘Algy met a bear,
The bear was bulgy.
And the bulge was Algy,’”
quoted Sue solemnly.
“Sue, I’m surprised,” laughed Polly. “Wouldn’t I love to see Miss
Calvert’s face if she heard that.”
“She would laugh, too—now.” Sue made a significant pause. “Here they
come. I heard the wheels on the bridge over the creek.”
So then they all left the sheep wagon, and their camp outfitting, to go
and greet the visitors from the Alameda. There was a tinge of color in
Miss Honoria’s delicate cheeks, and she looked around at her girls with
a happy smile that spoke volumes.
“I wanted her to rest after her long journey,” Mrs. Sandy said,
tenderly, “but she said she’d rather come over. Sister, you’d better sit
up on the stoop where it’s cool.”
Honoria smiled proudly, and obeyed.
“She has mothered me every minute since I arrived, Mrs. Murray,” she
exclaimed. “And the girls all know well how self-reliant I am.”
“Don’t you love to be mothered, though?” asked Polly, eagerly. “I do.”
“We all do,” declared Mrs. Sandy. “And the oldest ones are always the
ones that need it most.”
“Who wants to ride with me?” called out the Chief. “Room for three
here.”
Isabel, Jean, and Ruth took advantage of the surrey, but the rest of the
girls were glad to wait while Don saddled up the ponies for them.
“The Doctor left us at the Forks back yonder,” said Sandy, driving on
with a salute to the group up on the low stoop. “He’s riding too. Said
he never sat in a vehicle when he could get a saddle and anything
beneath it with four legs. The Fork trail is a good short cut to the
Gulch, and he can’t miss the way. We’ll find him sitting on old Zed’s
doorstep just like a forest foundling.”
The girls laughed heartily at the picture. It was a splendid day. The
wind rippled the leaves of the cottonwoods along the river, and sent
their bits of down sailing away into the air. The far-off mountain range
to the northwest seemed incredibly near, and for once its trailing robes
of violet and gray were laid aside. Every peak stood out distinctly.
Down in the valley Archie was hammering at a new bar gate, and every
blow seemed to rouse a hundred echoes from old Topnotch’s crags and
precipices.
“We haven’t brought anything to dig with,” said Ruth, in her quiet, dry
way. “There are some old picks at the shack, I think. We can use those
if the Doctor wants us to help him.”
“Old-time poll picks, those are,” the Chief explained. “Zed used to go
around, digging one prospecting hole after another. It’s a wonder he
never found the skeleton himself.”
“I think it must have been covered up until the big storm,” Peggie
called from her saddle. “Don and I have been down through the valley
lots and lots of times, and we’d never noticed that great ledge of rock
before. We would surely have seen it.”
It was past noon when they finally reached the gulch, and just as the
Chief had predicted, they found the Doctor sitting on the doorstep,
smoking his short brier-wood very peacefully, and reading from a pocket
edition of some favorite author. It was characteristic of him to be so
occupied just on the brink of a discovery.
Peggie led the way up to the cavern, and all, even Sandy himself,
followed after her. The horses were hobbled in Zed’s little clearing,
and the surrey team was hitched to a tree. Behind Peggie trod the
Doctor, then Polly and Jean, last of all, the Chief, and his three
scouts, as he called them. It was an important and solemn occasion, and
even the irrepressible Ted and Sue walked soberly, and refrained from
any giggles. They all realized fully just what the discovery would mean
if it turned out to be authentic and valuable. The Murrays were far from
being even well-to-do. There were too many mouths to feed, too many
school bills to cover. And to Peggie belonged the credit of first
discovery. Some share of the reward must be hers too, they knew.
“If any old deer or buffalo has dared to crawl ’way into that cave to
die,” said Polly, as they all paused to rest at one place, “I shall give
up all hope of founding the Sisters of the Geological Society, Doctor.”
“I think it’s a tidy little mastodon myself,” Ted remarked. “Nobody’s
asked me what my opinion is, but I’m sure it’s a mastodon.”
“Mastodons are very ordinary, Ted,” Ruth said. “They’ve been found even
in New York State.”
“Truly? Dead ones?” cried Ted, and they all laughed at her earnestness.
“What other kind do you suppose, Edwina?” asked the Doctor, severely. “A
mastodon was dug up at Newburg, along in the forties.”
But here Peggie started ahead once more, so conversation was checked.
Only once the Doctor spoke.
“It will be difficult getting it out.”
That gave Polly courage. Surely, unless there was good ground for hope,
he would not have said that. The Doctor was very quiet, very
non-committal, she knew. She could hardly wait to get to the cave, and
watch him. She was sure she could tell right away, whether or not there
was hope, just from the expression of his face.
“There it is,” said Peggie finally, with a little throb of happy pride
in her tone, as she stopped short and pointed to the great jaw-like
opening a few yards away. “It’s inside there.”
Instead of going into the cave at once, as the girls expected him to do,
the Doctor paused at the opening to look at the rock formation of the
ledge.
“It is limestone, isn’t it?” asked Polly. “And it is certainly blue.
They call this other kind of rock that crumbles, shale.”
“It’s good stuff,” the Doctor said approvingly. “Very good stuff. Now,
let us go in and look at Exhibit A.”
There was no need of a light. The cave, as the girls called it, was
really nothing but the great space left under the ledge by the tearing
away of a mass of the earth. Peggie scrambled over the rough ground
until she came to the precious bones, then stopped.
“There they are!” she cried.
Every one was wonderfully silent now. The Doctor’s face was grave too,
but behind his eyeglasses his gray eyes looked keen and bright. He laid
his cap to one side, and sat down deliberately beside the remains. And
he “handled them, and dandled them,” as Polly said afterwards, as
happily and contentedly as a mother with a brand-new baby.
“Want a pick Doctor?” called Sandy. “I can give you a hand too, if you
want to dig.”
“I wouldn’t disturb it for worlds,” returned the Doctor, “I want some of
my colleagues to see it, just like that. I believe we’ve struck into the
perfect Jurassic drift, unsuspected in this section entirely.”
“But what is it?” asked Polly, anxiously.
“Just what you said it was, Polly, child. A part of the vertebræ of a
dinosaurus, I feel sure. It is not a ninety-foot one, by any means, but
if we can judge from this section here, it must be at least thirty to
thirty-five feet long—long enough to justify a good leap in the dark if
you saw one coming at you.”
“How long has it been there, do you suppose?” asked Sue, in an awed
tone. It seemed so wonderful to think that the discovery was really
authentic. All along, they had half-questioned it, except Ruth and
Polly.
“Sue, we don’t know,” returned the Doctor, musingly, as he took a
penknife out of his pocket, and scraped at the bone. “We’re trying to
find out just such things as that, we old chaps who prowl around the
face of the earth, and try to win Mother Nature’s confidence. It may be
ten million years ago, some say ten thousand. When we start and figure
how long it takes for the Colorado River to eat its way through even an
inch deeper in the Grand Canyon, we begin to realize how many years it
must have taken for it to cut down all the way from the top.”
“It makes me feel dizzy,” said Ted, emphatically.
“It has made wiser heads than yours feel dizzy, child,” returned the
Doctor, gently. “And we are only children that He holds in His hand.
When I begin to feel pretty good, and well satisfied with myself, I go
away quietly, and read over that chapter in Job that has more geological
data in it than anything I know of.”
“I know,” said Polly. “‘Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of
the earth?’”
“Exactly. Where were we? It takes all the conceit out of me when I
consider a bit. Mr. MacDowell, this gulch belongs to you, doesn’t it?”
“I’m sorry to say it does,” said the Chief, fervently. “I just wish that
poor old Zed were here to claim his own. He put all his love into this
old strip of land for years, and it never opened its heart to him.”
“Purpose in all things,” protested the old Doctor, cheerily. “Maybe he
would have buried the cash receipts in a tin can, for all we know. You
have a better use for them. I want to send a telegram as soon as we can
get to a station. We’ll get some more authority on the remains than my
own, and then come to terms. How’s that? In the meantime, let’s go back
to dinner, for I am starved.”
In the ride back, the Doctor and Ruth went ahead, for Ruth was fairly
bursting with questions she wanted to ask. Polly and Peggie were last of
all. Sue had changed places with Ruth, and was in the surrey, letting
Ruth ride her pony.
“Sandy says I’m to have a third of whatever he gets,” Peggie said, her
cheeks pink with excitement. “He says one third goes to me for finding
it, and one third to Mrs. Sandy, and one third for him.”
“Oh, Peg, I’m so glad for you,” cried Polly, joyfully. “Will you come to
school with us? Will you, Peggie? We’d take you into our club, and have
the best times.”
Peggie smiled radiantly.
“I will if mother says so,” she promised.