EARTf "JCI -JrtAR THE MONSTER- HUNTERS BOOKS BY FRANCIS ROLT-WHEELER ZDU S* Service Series Illustrations from Photographs taken for U. S. Govern- ment. Large I2mo. Cloth. Price $1.50 each. THE BOY WITH THE U. S. SURVEY THE BOY WITH THE U. S. FORESTERS THE BOY WITH THE U. S. CENSUS THE BOY WITH THE U. S. FISHERIES THE BOY WITH THE U. S. INDIANS THE BOY WITH THE U. S. EXPLORERS THE BOY WITH THE U. S. LIFE-SAVERS LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO., BOSTON Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History. A BATTLE TO THE DEATH. Arsinothere of three million years ago impaling a carnivorous creodont, somewhat resembling a hyena. THE MONSTER -HUNTERS BY FRANCIS $OLT-WHEELER Author of' 4 U. S. Service Series " WITH FIFTY-THREE ILLUSTRATIONS, MOSTLY FROM PHOTOGRAPHS LOANED BY THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY BOSTON LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO. Published, June, 1916 Copyright, 1916, BY LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD Co. All Rights Reserved ' THE M'0N"sRvHUNTERS IRorwooD press BERWICK & SMITH CO. NORWOOD, MASS. U. S. A. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The Author desires to express his appreciation of the consultation and assistance of Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn, President of the Amer- ican Museum of Natural History, New York City, and of the members of the Scientific Staff of the Museum, especially: Dr. Frederic A. Lucas, Di- rector ; Dr. W. D. Matthew, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology; Mr. Walter Granger, Associate Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology (Mammals) ; and Mr. Barnum Brown, Associate Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology (Eeptiles). The Au- thor further wishes to express appreciation for the use of illustrations provided by the Museum, naming especially the restorations of Mr. Charles E. Knight. 954158 PEEFACE Mystery and marvel are the gates to that wild world where the Monsters of the past lived out their monstrous lives. Adventure that carries one into those steaming coal forests, into those black and reptile-haunted swamps, that sets one face to face with the sprawling brood of giants, terribly menacing and terribly true, holds a thrill peculiar to itself. So startling, so madly strange seem the conditions that we scarcely dare to be- lieve the adventure true, and then, the slow proc- esses of Time turn one by one the pages of that age-old book, and the most extravagant flight of the imagination is outdistanced by facts. Out to the waste and desert corners of the earth, men go to read these stories. They find the bones of the colossal gladiators still locked in their Ti- tanic struggle, though that struggle ended in death ten million years ago; they find a ruthless war of tooth and claw made tenfold more ferocious than any combat of living beasts of prey by the huge bulk, and the terrible offensive and defen- PREFACE sive weapons of those vast animals that the Earth could no longer tolerate. There is scarcely a place in all the world where a boy cannot find for himself some tokens of this Age of Monsters, where he cannot himself be the hunter and the captor of strange things. In this book all that is told of that grim past is true and every statement may be taken as scientifically ac- curate. To show to the boys of the United States the thrill of discovery in their own country, and the splendor of the work that their scientists and museum experts are accomplishing, is the aim and purpose of THE AUTHOR. CONTENTS PAGE CHAPTER I KILLING THE LAST DRAGON 1 CHAPTER II THE MONSTERS THAT NEVER WERE 28 CHAPTER III PIRATES OF THE AIR 52 CHAPTER IV SEEING THE SEA-SERPENT 81 CHAPTER V THE MAD ARTIST AT THE SPHINX . 116 CHAPTER VI ACROSS THE DESERT ON CAMEL-BACK 154 CHAPTER VII FINDING THE ELEPHANT'S GREAT-GRANDFATHER . . . 187 CHAPTER VIII THE VALLEY OF FOSSIL WHALES 208 CHAPTER IX THE MARCH OF THE MASTODONS 237 CHAPTER X THE THREE-TOED HORSE 277 CHAPTER XI UNDER THE CLAWS OF A DINOSAUR . 306 ILLUSTRATIONS A Battle to the Death Frontispiece FACING PAGE Dragon Slain by Regulus 20 Scylla of the Seven Heads 20 Merman from the Mediterranean 20 The Dragon of the Draehenfels 20 Monsters Thought Real by the Ancients .20 The Unicorn in China 42 Stegosaurus, the Super-Dreadnought of Old .... 50 The Largest Creature that Ever Flew 72 A Flying Nightmare of Olden Time 72 Sea-Serpent Attacking a Pirate Ship 82 The Fiercest Monster that Ever Lived 84 The Sharp-Toothed Death 86 The Jurassic Sea-Serpent 86 Combat Between Ichthyosaurus and Plesiosaurus . . 88 Sea-Serpent Swallowing Sailors 96 The Most Authentic Sea-Serpent 96 Waiting for the Load 158 Roaring at the Weight 158 Rising, Still Protesting 158 Ready for Desert March 158 A Camel Being Loaded with Half-Ton Fossil Cases . . 158 At the Temple of Qasr-el-Sagha 194 Across the Libyan Desert 194 ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE Zeuglodon, the Primitive Whale 220 Climbing to the Fossils 228 Finding a Sea-Cow Skeleton 228 The Four-Horned Giants at Bay 232 Into the Heart of Mexico 242 Carrying Shell of Glyptodont 242 Pteranodon, Climbing for a Swoop 250 Finding the Eobasileus 256 The Eobasileus or Loxolophodon 256 The American Mastodon 270 The Siberian Mammoth 270 The Mammoth Tusk He Found 276 Uncovering a Frozen Mammoth . 276 Finding the Eohippus 292 Eohippus, the Four-Toed Horse 292 Finding the Mesohippus 294 Mesohippus, the Three-Toed Horse 294 Smilodon, the Sabre-Tooth Tiger 302 Museum Camp in Wyoming Bad Lands 308 The Largest of the Titanotheres 308 Herd Crossing Red Deer River, Alberta . . . . . 312 Museum Boat Camp on Red Deer River 312 Opening (Rear Tent) to Moropus Quarry . . . . . 322 Inside the Moropus Quarry, Agate, Neb 322 The Dryptosaurus, a Giant Carnivorous Reptile . . . 328 Unearthing a Saurolophus Skeleton 330 Unearthing a Diplodocus Hind Limb 330 Brontosaurus in his Native Swamp 332 Trachodon, a Duck-Billed Dinosaur 338 A Brachiosaur, Largest of All Land Creatures .... 346 THE MONSTER- HUNTERS THE MONSTER-HUNTERS CHAPTER I KILLING THE LAST DBAGON * ' FATHEB, I want a dragon ! ' ' The shrewd old merchant lowered the evening newspaper he was diligently reading, and looked over it at his son. " All right, my boy," he said with a smile ; " go ahead and get one." " But I mean a real dragon! " " About how big, Perry? " " I'd like one about a hundred feet long, if I could find it." " You don't want much," was his father's half- humorous reply, as he folded the newspaper so that he could read the next column with more ease. After a few moments, pursuing the sub- ject, he continued, "Is there any particular breed of dragon that you're after? " " What I really want," the boy answered, " is i i THE MONSTER-HUNTERS One of those spiny ones the sort Uncle George discovered out West." The keen old financier looked thoughtful, then deliberately took off his reading-glasses, laid down the' paper and turned to the boy. " You're talking about fossil monsters, then," he said. " Yes, Father, that's it exactly. And I do hope you '11 let me do it! " The boy's earnestness was evident, and he knew he could count on his father, for they had always been close friends. " Let you do what? " the merchant queried in response. " I suppose all this preamble about a dragon means that you have some crazy notion in your head. Come along, son, tell me all about it. ' ' This was the chance for which Perry Hunt had long been waiting, and he snatched eagerly at it. " There's a chap I know," he sputtered, " who's going 'way out to the South Dakota Bad Lands to prospect for fossils. He's a freshman at Princeton, and it's their expedition. He told me he was sure he would be able to take me along, if I could fix things up at my end. I've always been wild to go fossil-hunting, Father, and this is a real chance. Can't I go? " KILLING THE LAST DRAGON 3 Mr. Hunt tapped the ash from the end of his cigar and looked inquiringly at his son. ' ' What in thunder do you know about fossils I ' ' he asked, abruptly. Perry colored. He was inclined to be shy about the things for which he really cared, and he had never before talked to his father about his hobby. The great secret of his boyhood had been a pas- sionate interest in the strange creatures which used to wander over the earth, millions of years before the first man. Mr. Hunt had a sharp, quizzical tongue, and Perry was afraid of being misunderstood and ridiculed. Now, however, the time for concealment was past and he spoke up valiantly. "IVe read nearly everything I could get hold of, along that line," he replied, " and IVe hung around our little Museum a lot. The curators and everybody have been bully to me down there, and they've let me putter about in the workshops. I really have learned quite a bit about fossils, Father, and Mr. Cavalier has shown me how to draw. IVe drawn heaps! " " The deuce you have! " the other commented. II Got any of those drawings still? " The boy nodded. 4 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS " Let me see them, Perry that is, if you don't mind." Still a little flushed with confusion, the boy went to his own room and came back a few minutes later with a sketch-book. His father turned over the pages. The drawings covered a period of several years, and though the first were crude, the later ones were quite well done. Those dated during the last year showed the results of real study. There was no doubting that the lad had picked up a fair knowledge of gross anatomy in following his hobby. Most of the pictures were copies from illustra- tions in scientific books or were drawn from models in the Museum. But there were a few, here and there, that were just fancy, idle sketches drawn for amusement's sake. Over one of these a picture-book dragon with scales and a snaky tail the old merchant paused, smiling. Several minutes elapsed before he turned the page. He went through the book twice without saying a word. At last he spoke. * * In the second drawer from the bottom, in that cabinet," he said, pointing to an old cupboard which Perry had never seen unlocked, and at the same time handing a key to the boy, " you will KILLING THE LAST DRAGON 5 find a large book bound in faded green leather. Bring it here." Although rebuffed by his failure to get a direct answer to his appeal for permission to go on the expedition, Perry took the key. He felt that, in some way, his present quest was connected with the question he had raised, and as he unlocked the cupboard, the boy wondered. In the drawer he found the faded book, with its cover of green Eussian leather all dry and crumbling to the touch, and brought it to his father. Still without comment, the old merchant slowly untied the string that held the covers of the ancient book to- gether, and opening it carefully, turned to the first page. There, drawn with childish detail, was a pic- ture of a dragon such as men in the Middle Ages believed that creature really to be, with two legs armed with claws, spiked wings, a long power- ful tail, scales, and a ferocious-looking head with jaws wide open, disclosing pointed teeth, while from the throat, flames and smoke were pouring in volumes. The boy looked up. " Why, Father " he began. With a faint smile, the old merchant pointed 6 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS to the date at the bottom of the drawing, its pen- cil marks so faint as to be almost indistinguish- able. " I must have been nine years old, then," he said. " I can remember well when I drew that beast. Father had a queer old Latin book, a sort of mediaeval natural history, and it gave a draw- ing of every supposedly known beast in the world. This was one of them. At that time I believed that a dragon was as real as a lion or an elephant. To tell you the truth, Perry, Pve never quite got away from the feeling of that old book of Aldro- vandus, his beasts were so much a part of my childhood. When I was a youngster I was con- vinced that any adventurous boy could find plenty of dragons like this one, if he only went to the right place to look for them." " And did the book tell you where to look? " " It did, exactly. It described a region south of Ethiopicus that was Upper Egypt where a vast region was uninhabited by men because of the presence of three or four of these monsters. I was determined to go there some day and kill a dragon." " And you took it all in, Father? " " Why not? Only a couple of years before, KILLING THE LAST DRAGON 7 Stanley rescued Livingstone in the first great ex- ploration across Africa. The region that Aldro- vandus wrote about, north of the Victoria Nyassa, in my day was still an absolutely unexplored ter- ritory. Anything might be there, even dragons." " I should think you'd have known there weren't any real dragons," protested Perry, with the cocksureness of a boy. " I had sense enough to know that I didn't know it all," said his father with a snort, empha- sizing the personal pronoun. ' ' Why even in your lifetime, boy, scientists have found an animal that no one had ever heard of before, still living in the African forests." " What was that, Father? " " The okapi, a sort of giraffe with dagger- shaped horns and striped on the legs something like a zebra. And that discovery is a good exam- ple of the sort of thing I mean. " Naturalists once used to laugh at some of the old pictures on the Egyptian temples which showed a beast like a cross between an antelope and a zebra, with stripes. One of the heads of the god Set, too, was unlike any animal known in the world. But when, in 1901, the first okapi was caught by Sir H. H. Johnstone in the Semliki 8 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS forest in Uganda, it was found that the old Egyp- tians of three thousand years ago were right, and that the modern naturalists were wrong in their disbelief. So you see, Perry, lots of things are possible that one would never expect." " But a dragon, Father! It's such a made-up sort of beast wings, teeth, snake's tail and all that sort of thing! " " Don't trouble yourself about that," his father answered, " there are plenty of dragons with wings, teeth and a snake's tail, and, what's more, Science calls them dragons. Draco volans, the flying dragon, that's their real name, my boy. But they are all small, none of them more than ten inches in length, including the tail." " Never heard of them," said Perry, incredu- lously. " If you don't want me to think you a born idiot," his father answered sharply, " don't let me catch you taking that tone, suggesting that a thing doesn't exist because you don't know about it. There are a few million things that you don't know now, and when you get older and have more sense, you'll find a few million more things that you don't know." " I'm sorry, Father," the boy said, in a milder KILLING THE LAST DRAGON 9 tone. " I didn't mean to be uppish. Won't you tell me about the ' flying dragon r ? " " They are small lizards," his father answered, 11 living throughout Malasia and in Madagascar. They have a long lizard-like tail, four inches in length, a fierce-looking head with a frill around it to make them look ferocious, and the skin from the body to the four legs is stretched out like that of a flying squirrel. If they were bigger, they could play the dragon's part well enough'. But, as I was saying, in my young days there wasn't any good reason why I should disbelieve the dragon. Aldrovandus said he possessed the skin of one, and that seemed good enough proof for me. Yet I think I would have said less about my be- lief in dragons, if I had any idea where it would land me. I don't think I ever told you the story of my fight with a dragon, did I? " " A real sure-enough fight? " " An actual fight with an actual dragon," said his father, with a smile. " But how could you? " " I did have one, just the same." 66 1 don't understand you a bit. Won't you tell the story, Father? " Without answering directly, the old merchant io THE MONSTER-HUNTERS turned over page after page of the drawing-book, its pages browned and the pencil-sketches faded with age, but all filled with dragons every kind of dragon that the boy of forty years ago had been able to discover or invent. At last he stopped before a picture of a weird beast, that looked like a cross between x a man-eating tiger, a Chinese dragon, an alligator, and a boa-constric- tor, which was breathing out fire and smoke as though it had a gas-works in its inside. In front of the dragon was represented a small boy, about as tall as the dragon's claw was long, and the youngster was sticking a knife as big as himself into the monster's breast. In the near distance, quite out of perspective, were a number of people running away in terror. " There," the old merchant said, with a mix- ture of amusement and complaisance, ' ' that was the beast I fought. Isn't that a sure-enough dragon for you? " After his former rebuke, Perry was a little du- bious about seeming too skeptical, but he could not help saying: " Well, that's hardly a photograph, is it, after all? " " No," his father answered, " it's not. I sup- KILLING THE LAST DRAGON 11 pose I'll have to admit that it is partly imagina- tive. But the dragon I fought was something like that." " You've got me guessing, " the boy admitted. " Won't you tell me the story, Father? It ought to be a great yarn." "I suppose I'll have to," the other agreed, " since IVe led you on so far." He reached out for a new cigar, clipped it, lighted it, and when sure that it was drawing properly, leant back in his chair and began. " I suppose I was about thirteen years old," he said reminiscently, ' ' when this famous combat was held. At that time my folks were living at a small place called Proctor's Cave, on the Green Eiver, in Kentucky, not far from the Mammoth Cave. As you probably know, Perry, that whole section is just riddled with caves, made by the gradual dissolving of the limestone rock through the action of underground rivers. Most of them, too, are full of stalactites. " Proctor's Cave, right on the river, was quite a growing town, and though it was small, there was a right smart heap of children in proportion to its size. About thirty-five boys around my age went to the school there. I can remember the 12 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS number because we were divided into two gangs. Ours had fifteen members and the other had twenty." "I suppose you were 'boss' of your gang, Father? " " I was the * War-Chief,' " was the smiling re- sponse. " Our gang was called the ' Indians ? and the others were the ' Pioneers.' You can see that it was natural for us always to be ready for a fight. Everything was taken in good part, though, until one day we caught one of the chaps in the other gang and scalped him." " You didn't really scalp him! " " No, not exactly. There were limits, Perry, even in my young days. But the victim thought it was genuine. That's where the trouble came in." " How was it, Father? " pleaded the boy, fairly wriggling with excitement. " As I remember," the old merchant contin- ued, musingly, " a week or so before, the l Pio- neers ' had got hold of one of our gang and had given him the t third degree.' They said that if he was an c Indian ' he ought to look like one. To make sure of it, they gave him a coat of war- paint with some stuff they got from a drug store, KILLING THE LAST DRAGON 13 and the war-paint wouldn't wash off. It wouldn't even scrape off. It was nearly a month before it wore off. " Our turn came when this ' Pioneer 9 was de- livered into our hands. We told him we were go- ing to have our revenge, and I tell you, he was scared stiff! We brought the youngster to our own private ' Indian ' cave, and there we discussed tortures, so that he could hear what was being said. Each one of us had some kind of torment more excruciating than the last." " It sure must have been blood-curdling to the chap who was listening, " put in Perry, with an appreciative grin. " I haven't a doubt of it," his father agreed. " Finally, we came to a formal decision and in- formed the victim that he was to be scalped alive. You should have heard him yell ! However, yell- ing didn't do any good, for the cave was half a mile from town and a couple of hundred feet underground, and he would have had to hoot like a Mississippi Eiver steamboat in order to be heard at all. So we went ahead and scalped him." " How, Father? " queried the boy, eagerly. " We made quite a ceremony of it," was the reply. " First of all, we gathered a lot of sting- i 4 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS ing nettles that grew outside the cave and mashed them up with vinegar in an old tin can. The vinegar, you know, holds the sting; it even seems to make it stronger. Then, in an old iron pot we had, we mixed up a lot of corn syrup and red ink we always used that in our initiation pow- wow, and it certainly did look and feel like blood. " Next we blindfolded the unfortunate ' Pi- oneer. ' We dipped a piece of string in the nettle juice and tied it loosely round his head, and sprinkled his head with the nettle vinegar, know- ing that it would only take a minute or two be- fore it began to sting. Then we took his cap, dipped it into the red ink and syrup, and clapped it not boiling, but still fairly hot on his head. At the same instant, one of the ' braves ' stuck a bit of stick in a loop of the nettle-soaked string and twisted it tight, also running his thumbnail around, as if it were a knife. The cap and the blindfold were then yanked off together. 11 The youngster gave just one look. He saw the cap, all blood, in the other fellow's hand, and jumped to the conclusion that it was his scalp. The tight string around his forehead felt like a cut and the nettles began to sting like blazes. He put his hand up to his head, felt the sticky KILLING THE LAST DRAGON 15 wetness, looked at his hand, all red, let out an ear- piercing screech, and started to run. That was forty years ago, but I believe he 'd have been run- ning yet, if he hadn't bumped into some one on the road. " ' Help ! I've been scalped ! ' he yelled. " I reckon he must have given the farmer a jolt, for while we were a good way from the Indian country, still there were plenty of ' hostiles ' about, and any day there might be a raid. This was about the time of the Little Big Horn Mas- sacre." " You mean Ouster's last stand? " " Yes. So, you see, the farmer had reason enough to be startled. As soon as he had a good look at the boy, though, he saw that the youngster was only frightened. He cut the nettle s.tring from the lad's head, washed off in the nearest brook as much of the red ink and corn syrup as he could, and started for town. " I thought we were in for real trouble, but to do that boy's father plain justice, I'll admit he was a good sport. Th'ough he was as mad as a hornet, he was fair. He gave me a good tongue- lashing, and told me which was true that I ought to have had more sense, -as the boy might 16 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS have been killed with fright. He repeated to me the old story of the man who was ordered to be beheaded, and who died when a cup of cold water was dashed on his neck in joke. Still, he said it was a boys' row, he remembered when he was a boy himself, and it wasn't his business to inter- fere.' He added that he hoped I would get my medicine from the other gang, twice as hot as I had given it." " That was fair enough, Father. " " Indeed it was. But even he was satisfied with what I got in return." " What was it? " The old merchant rolled up his sleeve to the shoulder, and showed his son a white scar running down almost the whole length of the upper arm. The wound had evidently been a deep one. " I got that from the dragon," he said. " You'd a real fight, then? " ejaculated Perry, surprised at this evidence of an actual encounter. " I was laid up for nearly a month," was the reply. " But they didn't build any statues to me as they did to St. George, when he slew the dragon, and no one gave me a triumph, as the peo- ple of Eome did to Eegulus over his combat with a monster." KILLING THE LAST DRAGON 17 66 1 never heard of the Eegulus story," Perry said. " It wasn't a story," his father corrected him, 1 ' it was a real fight, like mine. Or at least it was said to he a real fight. Regains sent home the skin of his dragon, and it was carried before him in his triumph. ' ' " But I thought all those dragon fights were just fairy tales ! ' ' " Most of them are," his father answered. " With the exception of mine, I think Eegulus' fight with the dragon is the only one that is sup- posed to be attested by history. Do you want to hear about it? " "I'd rather hear yours," Perry replied. "I'll come to that presently," the merchant assured him, ' ' and the story of Eegulus may put you in the right frame of mind to hear about my prowess. " Marcus Atillius Eegulus, almost the only his- torical character to have fought with a dragon," he began, " bore one of the noblest names in Eome. You may have learned in school, Perry, how he ravaged the shores of Africa and brought Carthage into subjection, but that, at the last mo- ment, he was defeated. As a prisoner, he was sent 1 8 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS by Carthage on an embassy to make peace, upon his own honorable promise to return to his foes to die by torture unless his embassy of peace was successful. On arriving at Eome, Eegulus gave the message with which he had been entrusted by the Carthaginians, but ended with a patriotic ap- peal to Eome not to let their affection and loyalty to him overtop their honor. "'Let the prisoners be left to perish un- heeded,' he said, * let war go on till Carthage be subdued.' His counsel prevailed, the offers of peace were refused, and Eegulus returned volun- tarily to Carthage. The Eomans have enshrined the name of Eegulus high in the pages of honor, but the Carthaginians had little understanding of valor and good faith. They cut off his eyelids, placed him in a barrel spiked with nails, knocked the head of the barrel out and fastened him there so that he was immovable. Even his hands were tied. Then they exposed him, naked, to the glare of an African sun, to die by the slow agonies of thirst, fever, the scorch of the sun upon the un- protected eyeballs, and the stinging insects of the desert." " But Eome got back at them? " " Yes," his father answered, " Scipio Africanus KILLING THE LAST DRAGON 19 captured Carthage, leveled every house to ground, sowed salt on the ruins and in the name of Eome forbade any building to be erected there again. But I've told you the story of Eegulus, son, so that you might see that such a man was scarcely likely to invent a story about a dragon to help his reputation." " Where did he fight the dragon? In Africa, too? " " Not very far from Carthage. It was in the year 256 B. c., after the first Punic War had been raging for eight years, that Eegulus captured the city of Utica, about sixty miles northwest of Car- thage, near the modern city of Tunis. Between Utica and Carthage flowed a river, then called the Bagrada, difficult to cross except at one ford. When Eegulus and his soldiers came to this ford, they found the passage disputed by an enormous dragon, one hundred and twenty feet long." " A real monster! " ejaculated the boy. " Wasn't he? And, so the old Eoman historian tells, the skin of the monster was so tough that the Eomans could not pierce his hide. Several times Eegulus led the attack upon the dragon, but each time the beast killed and devoured several of the soldiers. At last Eegulus brought up the 20 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS artillery, the ballistaB and catapults, and bom- barded the dragon. Supported by the artillery, Eegulus plunged across the river alone, fought the dragon single-handed and slit his throat. The skin was carried to Eome and graced Eegulus' triumph." * ' What do you suppose it really was f ' ' queried the boy. " I think, " his father answered, " it must have been a huge crocodile. That would explain why the Eoman swords could not pierce the so-called dragon's hide, and why the combat seems to have taken place at the ford of a river. " * l But a hundred and twenty feet long, Father ! ' " Possibly that was worked out from the skele- ton. In those days it would be quite easy to put the backbones of several animals together. That trick was done only thirty years ago, when Dr. Albert Koch collected the bones of two or three Zeuglodons or primitive whales and made a mon- ster which he called ' Hydrarchus, the Water King,' and which he exhibited all over Europe. Eegulus' dragon, carried in his triumph, might have been something of the kind. As for the Zeu- glodons, I've often thought that the discovery of skeletons of antediluvian beasts might have been KILLING THE LAST DRAGON 21 one of the reasons for popular belief in dragons." " Was yours one of that kind? " " Mine/' said his father, with a twinkle in his eye, " was a real dragon." * ' But it couldn't be, Father. You said the other gang had something to do with it! " " They unearthed him from his lair," the other answered. " I suppose I'll have to tell you just how it all happened, Perry, and then you'll see if you don't think I deserve a triumph, just as much as Eegulus did! " The boy waited expectantly, and, in a moment, his father continued: " All that summer, the summer after the scalp- ing, I was on the lookout for squalls, but nothing happened. The ' Pioneers ' didn't seem to be trying to get their revenge, or if they were try- ing, we were too much on the alert. I afterwards found out that they had been laying plans all summer, but that none of them had worked. It was not until the autumn that their plot came to a head. " One evening, late in October, when it was al- ready beginning to get dark early, I was delayed in going to the cave. It was one of the regular evenings for a meeting and we had something 22 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS very important to do I forget what, now so I was running at a good clip. Just as I struck the little hidden path that diverged toward the cave, I heard the fellows talking loudly, in ex- cited tones. Wondering what could have hap- pened, for it was one of the rules always to ap- proach the hiding place in silence, I quickened my run still more, and in a minute or two, burst upon the fellows who were gathered in a clump not far from the entrance to the cave. The sec- ond I appeared, three or four of them shouted, in a breath: ' ' * Chief ! There 's a dragon in the cave ! ' " I told you, Perry, that I'd always done a lot of talking about dragons, and this ought to have made me suspicious. But I'd been reading, a day or two before, about Eegulus, and all my early interest had been suddenly awakened. As I look back on it now, I don't think doubt even entered my mind. The gang was evidently so scared that the scare got into my bones, too. " I found out that one of the smallest of the boys had come early and gone into the cave, and that he had rushed out again, screaming to another fellow, who was just coming up the path, that in the cave there was a huge dragon, with a shin- KILLING THE LAST DRAGON 23 ing tail, breathing out flames. He said it had roared at him and that it was as long as a barge. " The older boy, he was l Chief Brave ' and second in command of the gang, had laughed at him, picked up a chunk of wood for a club, and started for the opening. Half-way down, he heard the growling of some beast and his courage oozed out. Without going in to see what it was, he bolted out again as promptly as the little lad had done. He was afraid the dragon would follow him, but nothing appeared. None of the rest of the gang had volunteered. They waited for me to show up, and tell them what to do. It wasn't that I was any bigger, son, but, after all, I was ' War Chief ' and it was my part to lead them on. " If there had only been the little fellow's story," the old merchant continued, " I don't think I'd have felt the same way about it. But the ' Chief Brave ' was not only a plucky sort, but I depended a good deal on his judgment. As I saw it, there was only one thing to do, and that was to face the monster and find out what could be done. If I could really slay a dragon, I thought, I should go down in history with Siegfried and Beowulf and all the rest of them. So I loaded an old horse pistol that we had, and, more for 24 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS show than anything else, stuck a bowie knife in my belt and started into the tunnel-like opening of the cave, the gang following cautiously behind. " I tell you, my boy, it was mighty uncomfort- able, creeping through that long, black passage, hearing nothing but the hard breathing of the frightened fellows behind. And when, about half- way down, the silence was suddenly broken by a savage, whining snarl, I had a feeling that ice was being rubbed down my spine. It wasn't quite my idea of a dragon's roar, it was worse, there was such an evil relish in the sound that the flesh under my hair just crawled. " If I had been alone, I'd have done the same thing as the others did, I'd have turned tail and got out of that place as quickly as I could. But the gang was behind me. I was afraid, afraid to death, of that snarl in front, but the fear of ridicule was even stronger. I would rather be clawed to death by a dragon than be guyed as a coward. So, gripping the pistol closer, I crawled forward. " I think I could have walked with more con- fidence, but on hands and knees, it was ghastly. I could put my hands out without difficulty, but the fear sent a spasm into my knees so that it KILLING THE LAST DRAGON 25 was hard to move them. Still, foot by foot, ever hearing that malignant whine grow closer, I groped my way through the opening. It was only fifty feet long, but it seemed interminable. At last I saw the light and, with a huge sense of re- lief, leaped from the narrow tunnel into the cave itself. ' ' I leaped almost into the monster 's jaws. For, facing the mouth of the tunnel, not six paces away, was the dragon, growling and snapping, while every few seconds he followed the clash of the gnashing teeth with that long whining snarl that had so scared me during that endless crawl in the dark." " What did he look like, Father? " In the half -dusk of the cave he looked f ear- ful T In my excitement he looked every inch a dragon. The front part of him was like a wolver- ine, and his body all glittered with silver scales. Behind him he dragged a thick tail, something like an alligator's, only round, all covered with shiny scales." " How about the fire-breathing business? " " I didn't stop to notice. I was too excited and too frightened to bother myself with think- ing what breed of dragon he was. I aimed the 26 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS old pistol and fired. The ' kick ' of it nearly broke my wrist. At the same instant, the dragon lifted himself heavily, dragging his hinder part, and launched full at me. I shrank back, flat against the wall of the cave, and his spring fell short. The hot froth and blood on his fangs slathered on my coat, and I knew that the monster was badly hurt. There was little room to dodge in that cave, but I jumped sideways. " He turned jerkily, and I saw that his huge tail was injured. For the first time, my spirits rose. It was his tail I had feared. I had been afraid that he would lash out with it, crushing me to pieces. If, however, he were already hurt, I might be able to dodge about him, and get the best of him yet. But he could move quicker than I thought. " Before I realized it, he was on me. Again he sprang, with that curious dragging of his hinder parts as though they were paralyzed. I had no room to dodge away, for the wall of the cave was behind me. In desperation, I pulled out my bowie knife. Before I could lunge, however, a paw with curved claws like Turkish daggers flashed out and laid my left arm open to the bone. " Eeeling from pain and the loss of blood, I KILLING THE LAST DRAGON 27 struck forward with the knife. I hit some kind of a bone, I remember, then felt the curious sense of the blade piercing through living flesh. Again the monster reared. I swayed back, too far gone to move my feet, which seemed fastened to the door of the cave. But as I stared, almost fasci- nated, into the green light of the creature's eyes, I saw a glaze pass over them. He reared, wavered and fell over in a heap. Almost I collapsed upon him myself, but as I tottered, one of the fellows sprang out from the mouth of the cave and caught me. He snatched the bowie to give another blow, but the dragon never moved again. My knife had reached the heart." CHAPTER II THE MONSTERS THAT NEVER WERE " BUT, Father/' cried Perry, " you haven't told me what the dragon really was! " " I didn't know, myself, for a few minutes," was the reply. " I dropped in my tracks, right there. A couple of the fellows picked me up, though, as soon as I began to feel a little less faint, and the three of us, waiting until we were sure that the monster was quite dead, went up close to him. I had noticed, in a dim kind of way, that the dragon's scales looked queer and that some of them had been scraped off on the floor of the cave. But when we got right up to him, what do you suppose we found those scales were? " " I haven't the ghost of an idea," the boy an- swered expectantly. ' ' They were made of the silver paper that comes wrapped around bars of chocolate." " What?" 38 MONSTERS THAT NEVER WERE 29 " Just plain silver paper. " " It was the other gang, then " suggested Perry, seeing a clue. " That's just what it was, the other gang." " Then it was a fake dragon! " cried the boy, disappointed. " You said it was alive! " " Does my arm look as if the beast hadn't been alive? " retorted his father. " It was a mighty lucky thing for me it wasn't any more alive than I found it!" " What was the dragon, really, Father? " the lad persisted. " It was a lynx, or bob-cat," was the reply. " The ' Pioneers ' had trapped the beast in the woods and brought it to our cave, with the trap still fastened to the bob-cat's hind foot. The other hind paw had been tied to a heavy log. " Then the fellows had gone to work and made a long tail of sacking, stuffed with shavings, and fastened this tail tightly around the lynx's haunches, so that it would trail behind. They'd dusted it all over with mustard and red pepper, so tha^ the animal wouldn't chew at it and tear it off. After that, they chucked a couple of pail- fuls of carpenter's glue, almost boiling hot, over the beast, head, tail and all, and stuck the silver 30 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS paper on, when the glue was wet. I don't won- der the bob-cat was savage ! " " They must have had a picnic doing it! " ex- claimed Perry. " IVe thought of that many times since, " his father agreed. " But they made a good job of it. They even took the trouble to cut all the silver paper in shapes so that it would look like real scales. ' ' " They took an awful chance, though, Father. Suppose the tail had come off? What would have happened to you? " " I don't think the tail saved me," the other answered. " After all, the bob-cat was badly crippled, with both hind legs out of commission. You see, Perry, a lynx leaps for his prey, grips with teeth and fore-claws and tears with the hind claws. With the trap on one foot and a log on the other, the other gang knew I was fairly safe. So far, they had been right enough. Where they went wrong was in not knowing the animal. They all thought the creature was just a big domestic pussy that had got a bit wild running around in the woods. It was a true lynx, though, and a big one." " Did you send the skin home for a * tri- MONSTERS THAT NEVER WERE 31 umph ' 1 ' ' the boy quickly asked. ' ' Where is it ! " " When that combination of glue and silver paper got thoroughly dry, ' ' the old merchant com- mented, " there wasn't much value to the skin. We kept it as a trophy, of course, but we kept it in the cave. For all I know, it's there yet. If you're so keen to find a dragon, Perry, I'll tell you exactly where to go for it." "I'm afraid even our own local Museum wouldn't take it," the boy objected, smiling. " Maybe they wouldn't, but, so far as I know, it's the only genuine dragon that has put up a genuine fight for the last couple of thousand years. So, my son, if you ever do go dragon-hunting, don't forget that your father was the last of all the champions of valor who fought and defeated a dragon single-handed." " Then you really will let me go dragon-hunt- ing with the Princeton crowd? " Perry inter- jected, returning to his first plea. "I've been thinking about it," his father an- swered meditatively, " and I don't think I will. Wait a bit " he continued, as he saw the bitter disappointment in the lad's face, " I haven't finished. I don't say that I won't let you go on a search for fossils some time, but I don't think 32 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS this Princeton expedition is the right thing for you. And I'll tell you why." " I'm sure it would, " burst out Perry. " I'll tell you why," his father said again, with that calm repetition from which the boy knew of old there was no appeal. " You would simply go as a helper, you wouldn't have any real share in the plan, and you would only have a lot of dirty and laborious work to do without any real chance to learn." " But, Father," interrupted the boy. He caught the glance of reproof and stopped. " If you interrupt me again, Perry, I shall not say what I was going to say and you'll be the loser. ' 9 Distinctly set back, Perry straightened himself and sat still. After a pause, his father continued : " That book of drawings you showed me, son, which covered several years of work, looks to me like fairly good evidence that your interest is genuine. I want to be sure that it's not just a fad, that you'll tire of in a month or two." "Oh, it isn't, Father!" " You'd say that, Perry, of course, in any case. Just the same I rather think you mean it. Now, what I want to say is this : Since you really so MONSTERS THAT NEVER WERE 33 seem to have an interest in these dragon-forms of old times, and as I suppose you've inherited it, to a certain extent, it seems to me that I ought to give you a chance to find out if that's the sort of thing you want to take up for your life-work. " So far, I haven't made any special plans for your future, Perry, because I haven't known just how your desires would run. I wanted to see which way the cat would jump, first. Do you really think that you would like to give your whole time to paleontology, or do you want to keep it as a hobby I Answer carefully, now, because quite a stretch of your life may hang on the re- ply." Perry thought for a minute or two, then an- swered slowly : " I think I'd rather try to find the monsters that no one has ever seen. I'd like to dig up secrets in all the queer corners of the world. I'd rather find a new kind of creature, such as no one had even dreamt of before, than be a multi-mil- lionaire! ' " Very good," his father answered, " if that's your feeling, my boy, you shall have your chance and you shall have it in the best way possible. I suppose you know that your Uncle George is 34 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS going to take out an expedition for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, this year? " " No, Father, I didn't know it," Perry replied. " Out West? " " I think not," his father answered. " If I remember rightly, when he was here a month or two ago, he said something about going to Egypt." "And I could go? " " That depends on a number of things," the old merchant answered, guardedly. " Still, there 's a possibility that I might persuade him to take you along. You see, Perry, if I were to pay for your part of the expenses out of my pocket, the New York Museum wouldn't lose anything and perhaps you might do something to help." " But that would cost a heap, Father." The financier smiled. 66 You don't imagine that you're not an ex- pense, do you? " he queried. " But I don't mind footing the bill for anything that will give you a real start in the world at the kind of work you want to do. I don't believe in wasting money on things you don't need that's why I wouldn't buy you that two-cylinder motorcycle but I'll keep my wallet open, any time that you want something MONSTERS THAT NEVER WERE 35 that is really worth while. Now trot along, son, and I'll write to Uncle George and see what he thinks about the whole project." " Thanks ever and ever and ever so much, Father, " the boy said, heartily, getting up from his chair, " and I do hope I can go ! Oh, and say, Father,'' he continued, pointing to the faded green book which lay on the table, ' t can I take this along and go over it a bit more thoroughly? I'll be ever so careful." " All right, son," the other answered, " but don't take what you see in there, literally. There are enough weird creatures in that book to make the fortunes of a dozen Barnums, if they could ever be found and put under a circus tent. Watch out that they don't give you a nightmare! " " I've dreamt about fossils, heaps and heaps of times, Father," said Perry grinning, as he opened the door. " Some of these days, I'm go- ing to make all those dreams come real, too! " As, in his own room, the boy turned over the pages of that book of his father's childhood, the fascination of the monsters of the past crept over him more and more. There was no doubt that Perry had inherited this interest, for every leaf of the volume before him was indelibily stamped 36 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS with the eagerness of a boy absorbed in the sub- ject. Although Perry was more or less familiar with the three-horned Triceratops, the twenty-ton Brontosaurus and the gaunt-winged Pterodactyl, the still stranger creatures in the faded green book were unknown to him. The Eoc, the Griffin, the Chimaera, the Phoenix, the Basilisk they were like characters in a fairy tale. Still, as he looked at the pictures of them limned by the boy of forty years ago, a strange feeling came over Perry that perhaps in some remote corner of the world these creatures might be living still. There was an air of expectant reality in their pose, and, not only had his father drawn them in the book, but he had also in a round imma- ture scrawl copied upon the opposite page the words of the old naturalists who claimed to have seen the monsters with their own eyes. One page showed (in red and yellow chalk) a blazing fire in an Egyptian temple courtyard, the flames of which shot higher than the pylons of the temple gateway. Full in the center of the flames, wearing a peaceful look as though enjoy- ing the process of being burned alive, was a large bird, with a crest of yellow feathers on its head, MONSTERS THAT NEVER WERE 37 like an imperial crown. Under the picture was written " The Phoenix," and on the page oppo- site, the story read: ' t Sir Thomas Browne says : * There is but one Phoenix in all the world, which after many hun- dred years burns herself, and from the ashes thereof riseth up another, is a conceit (belief) of great antiquity, not only delivered by humane (learned) writers but frequently expressed by holy writers.' " Perry's father then ten years old, had added: " Swan says this can't be right because the ani- mals had to go two by two into the Ark, and if there was only one Phoenix, Noah wouldn't have let him in till he got another, and as there wasn't another to get, he had to stay out, and everything that stayed out, died. For feathers of the Phoenix, see next page." Wondering what in the wide world the feathers of the Phoenix could be like, Perry turned eagerly to the next page. There his father had drawn two long feathers and under them had written : " Feathers of the Phoenix. In Tradescant's Museum, in Italy." " But," said Perry aloud, " I know what those feathers are! They're from the Japanese Long- 3 8 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS tailed Fowl! I don't wonder that those old fel- lows thought a feather eight feet long must come from a queer kind of bird! I think I'd do some guessing myself! ' Old Sir John de Mandeville, that joyous trav- eler of the fourteenth century, was responsible for the next weird beast. This was a combination of an eagle and a lion. Perry's father had evi- dently drawn it from a crest and labeled it " The Griffin," while opposite was de Mandeville 's de- scription : " Some men say that they have the body up- ward of an eagle and beneath, of a lion; and that is true. But one Griffin has a greater body and is stronger than ten lions, and greater and stronger than a hundred eagles." " I should think," commented Perry to him- self, " Father could have seen that this was a fake, because a Griffin with a body as heavy as ten lions would have to have wings the size of an armored aeroplane. ' ' The boy had hardly framed the words, when turning the page, he saw some birds pictured, which made the largest modern flying machine seem small. In the distance was one of these huge birds flying away with an elephant in its beak. MONSTERS THAT NEVER WERE 39 Near by, a man in turban and robe was tying him- self to the claw of one of the birds, the creature 's leg being as thick as the trunk of a big tree. This was " The Eoc," and Perry's father had copied out in his smallest handwriting, all that happened to Sindbad the Sailor and the Third Calendar in the land of the Eoc, as told in the Arabian Nights.. " I suppose," mused Perry, " the Eoc is just the .ZEpyornis exaggerated. After all, it's only the other day that somebody found an -ZEpyornis egg bobbing up and down on the waves off Mada- gascar after a hurricane and that egg was nearly seven times as big as an ostrich egg. You can't blame a fellow in Madagascar several centuries ago figuring that a bird to lay an egg like that must be seven times as tall as an ostrich. My eye, wouldn't a bird over fifty feet high be a bogey ! And yet they told me down at the Museum that an -ZEpyornis was really only about eleven feet high." The Basilisk or Cockatrice was the next wonder that struck the boy's gaze. Evidently his father had found some difficulty in securing a picture of the creature, for under the fantastic drawing were the words: " The Basilisk. This one I made up." 40 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS The monster .resembled a serpent walking on its tail, in grand and imposing style, with two searchlights for eyes. On the opposite page was a quotation from John Swan, the author of the curious old book " Speculum Mundi " (A Mirror of the World), which was written in the first half of the seventeenth century. It read: 66 The Cockatrice is the king of Serpents, not for his magnitude or greatness, but for his stately pace and magnanimous mind. Among all living creatures there is none perisheth sooner by the poyson of a Cockatrice than a man; for with his sight he killeth him. His hissing is likewise said to be bad, in regard that it blasteth trees, killeth birds, etc., by poysoning the aire." Perry turned over page after page. He saw the picture of the Humma, the bird without feet, that was supposed never to alight on the ground. There was a drawing of the Wak-Wak tree which had beautiful women for fruit. The Chimaera was not forgotten, with its head of a lion, body of a goat, and tail of a serpent. A whole section of the faded green book was given to the monsters who were half men, half beasts. There Perry saw his old friends the Cen- taurs, and among them Cheiron, " wisest of beasts MONSTERS THAT NEVER WERE 41 and men," human to the waist, with a horse's body. Pan, playing on his pipes of reed, was sitting on a fallen tree-trunk, while goat-legged Satyrs and Fauns danced to his piping. One par- ticularly creepy picture showed the Gorgons, with writhing poisonous snakes in place of hair, whom, the Greeks believed, it was death to look upon, and none of the monsters that were slain by Her- cules, Theseus, and Perseus was forgotten. Little by little the spell of the old-time won- derland began to creep over Perry. At first these childish drawings of monsters had seemed impos- sible, but earnest belief in the artist always re- veals itself in the picture, and Perry's father, when a boy, had believed in these creatures just as did the ancient Greeks. The spirit of the boy who had fought the lynx, believing it to be a dragon, stirred on those pages and quickened Perry's blood. At last he came to Unicorns. Page after page of unicorns! The boy read the story of Verto- mannus who measured two unicorns that had been presented to the Sultan of Mecca in 1503. He learned how Father Lobo, a missionary, had chased a unicorn in Abyssinia in 1622. He saw the drawings of one-horned asses in China sent 42 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS to Eome by Grueber, the Jesuit Father, in 1661. From utter disbelief, he passed to doubt, and his doubt received a sudden shock when he read that the Russian naturalist Prjevalsky, in his book " Mongolia," published in 1876, had declared that the orongo, in northern Thibet, sometimes, though rarely, has one horn, though not in the center of the forehead. To this picture there was a note, in his father's handwriting, evidently made after he was grown up. It read: " Personally, I see no reason to deny the ex- istence of the unicorn. It is quite likely that oc- casional specimens of a two-horned animal should only have one horn. The narwhal often has two tusks, but generally only one. If the one-tusked narwhal is a natural development, why not a one- horned antelope? The Nepalese unicorn sheep has one horn, and a rhinoceros, as well." The faded green book dropped into Perry's lap, as he leaned back in his chair, thinking. He re- called the finding of the okapi, only a few years before, and his mind pictured an adventurous trip into Central Thibet where the one-horned orongo of Prjevalsky, the unicorn, might still be found. Deeper and more profound grew the day-dream, more and more real the vision, until, with a start, THE UNICORN^ IK Ch$b*A..'-> The Sz, or Malayan Rhinoceros, a^ pictured by a Chinese artist in the 'Rh Ya. The Indian Rhinoceros -is 7 queried the boy. " That's a little difficult to say," was the guarded reply. " There's not much evidence to go on. There seems no doubt that Friis and Grip- penhjelme found something. The remarks about a parrot's beak by one, and the other's reference to a polyp suggest that perhaps a giant squid and an octopus were washed ashore together, and if, 94 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS as probable, their flesh already was decaying, ex- amination would be apt to be very brief. Don't forget, Perry, that the size was only an estimate. Even the most conservative guesses shrink under the application of a two-foot rule." ' ' Yet you seem to think, Uncle George, that some of the sea-serpent reports might have something in them!" " All of them are based on something," was the reply, * ' and there are a few that one hesitates to deny. It would almost seem certain that there are some large creatures in the sea, in addition to the whales, though probably nothing as large as a full-sized sulphur-bottom whale. It is equally certain that, whatever these creatures may be, they are not serpents, though they may possess snake- like features. One has to be careful about de- nials," he went on, taking a battered old note- book out of his pocket, and turning over the leaves, " because some reports are quite circum- stantial. The most famous of them was the re- port once made by the captain and officers of a British man-o'-war, the frigate D&dalus, in 1848. I thought I had that note in here. Yes, here it is. " Listen to this, Perry," he went on, " and per- haps your disbelief will have a jolt: SEEING THE SEA-SERPENT 95 " * I have the honor,' " he read, " ' to acquaint you for the information of my Lord Commission- ers of the Admiralty, that at 5 o 'clock P. M. on the 6th of August last, in latitude 24 44' S. and longitude 9 22' E. (1,000 miles west of the coast of South Africa) with the weather dark and cloudy, wind fresh from the NW, with a long ocean swell from the SW, the ship on the port tack head- ing NE by N, something very unusual was seen by Mr. Sartoris, midshipman, rapidly approach- ing the ship from before the beam. The circum- stance was immediately reported by him to the officer of the watch, Lieutenant Edgar Drum- mond, with whom and Mr. Wm. Barrett, the master, I was at the time walking the quarter- deck. " * On our attention being called to the object, it was discovered to be an enormous serpent, with head and neck kept about four feet constantly above the surface of the sea, and, as nearly as we could approximate, by comparing it with the length of what our main-topsail yard would show in the water, there was, at the very least, 60 feet of the animal, a fleur d'eau (flush with the surface of the water), no portion of which was, to our per- ception, used in propelling it through the water 96 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS either by vertical or horizontal undulation. It passed rapidly, but so close under our lee quar- ter, that had it been a man of my acquaintance, I should easily have recognized his features with the naked eye, and it did not, either in approach- ing the ship or after it had passed our wake, devi- ate in the slightest degree from its course to the SW, which it held on at the pace of from 12 to 15 miles per hour, apparently on some determined purpose. " 'The diameter of the serpent was about 15 or 16 inches behind the head, which was, without any doubt, that of a snake, and it was never, dur- ing the twenty minutes that it remained in sight of our glasses, once below the surface of the water; its color a dark brown, with yellowish-white about the throat. " ' It had no fins, but something more like the mane of a horse, or rather, a bunch of seaweed, washing about its back. It was seen by the quar- termaster, the boatswain's mate and the man at the wheel, in addition to myself and officers above mentioned. " ' I am having a drawing of the serpent made from a sketch taken immediately after it was seen, which I hope to have ready for transmission to SEA-SERPENT SWALLOWING SAILORS. From the records of the Swedish bishop-explorer, Glaus Maguus. ____ CourtvHii of Illustrated London News. THB MOST AUTHENTIC SEA-SERPENT. This drawing was made on the British man-o'-war Daedalus, and the captain and officers, men of high naval rank and standing, signed an official statement that the creature closely resembled this drawing, made at the time. The monster was observed for more than twenty minutes and came close to the vessel. Science has never be^n^a-hle, to, , , ,, explain this sea-serpent, and ij rs;stjl one of the mysteries of the SEEING THE SEA-SERPENT 97 my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty by to- morrow 's post.' " ' PETER M'QUHAB, Capt' " " What on earth can that have been! " queried Perry, in surprise. " It sounds almost real, somehow! " " It was real enough/' was the reply. " There's no doubt of that. The only question is: What was it that they saw? The sketch I copied it in my book, here it is shows that it wasn't a serpent. The captain thought it was a serpent, because it was long and thin. A worm is long and thin, but it isn't a serpent; an eel is long and thin, but it isn't a serpent; and a rib- bon-fish may be fifty or sixty feet long, but it's not in the least like a snake. Look at the head in the sketch, Perry, and you'll see that it isn't like a snake's head, at all." Perry took the note-book and looked at the draw- ing with the intensest interest. " It doesn't look like anything in particular," he said, " it's more like a cross between a seal and a whale." The scientist nodded approvingly. " Once in a while, Perry," he said, " you show 98 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS a whole lot of good sense. Professor Owen, the great naturalist, when the Dcedalus sketch was shown him, wrote a long article suggesting that what Captain M'Quhae had seen was a sea-ele- phant, of which specimens have been found nearly thirty feet in length. And a sea-elephant is of the family of the seals. " Personally, I rather question whether Profes- sor Owen was right, because so conspicuous a thing as the trunk-like prolongation of the nose, at least a foot long, would not have escaped the attention of sailors. Seamen's eyes are keen for objects in the water. Some of the supposed sea-serpents prob- ably have been squids, some have been schools of porpoises, some have been ribbon-fish, but I think the monster seen from the quarter-deck of the Dcedalus was probably some aged and patriarchal creature of the seal variety, a mammal and not a reptile, a creature of this age, not of an age of two million years ago." The porpoises had passed far out of sight long before this conversation was ended, but his uncle 's belief that there was some huge creature still swimming in the seas quickened the lad's inter- est, and he scanned the waters with the profes- sor's field-glass eagerly and often. He thought SEEING THE SEA-SERPENT 99 of the phrase " beginner's luck " and his hopes continued unabated. Two days later land was sighted, and the steamer came to the great gateway of that sea which has formed the basin of civilization, that great Mediterranean Sea on which Venice, Borne, Greece, Egypt, and Phoenicia have played their part. To the right, lay mysterious Africa ; to the left, frowning and sheer, rose the great rock of embattled Gibraltar, Great Britain's guardian of the straits. The boy was enjoying the sight of land and picturing to himself the scene if the dogs of war were loosed and that front of rock should suddenly belch forth a flame curtain of fire and death before which no vessel could live for a mo- ment. " No signs of Scylla and Charybdis," said a voice behind him. " That's so, Uncle George," the boy said, turn- ing, " this is where the old Greeks believed Scylla to be, isn't it? But I'd rather tackle that six-headed monster, in spite of all her appetite, even though each head took a man from the crew, as it did from Ulysses' ship, than I would run the gauntlet of the guns of Gibraltar let loose on us. Still, even Scylla might be uncomfortable. What ioo THE MONSTER-HUNTERS do you suppose was the basis of that old story, Uncle George! " " Personification of the peril of adventure," was the reply. ' i That is why Scylla and Charyb- dis were first said to hold guard over the Straits of Messina, between Sicily and Italy, while after- wards the twin terrors of the ravening whirlpool and the six-headed man-eating woman monster were located at Gibraltar. As the Straits of Mes- sina became more familiar, the terror had to be put farther away, where only the most daring would venture. " Eemember, Perry, that the Greeks believed they saw a god or a goddess or a demon in all the forces of Nature. The sea was under the rule of Poseidon, or Neptune, as the Romans called him; the dawn goddess Eos, or Aurora, was the mother of the Winds, such as Boreas, the North Wind and Zephyr, the West Wind. So, you see, the Greeks felt sure that every point of danger must be guarded by some kind of demon or mon- strous form, while beautiful places were inhabited by fair maidens. After all, Perry, it's not so very long ago since people believed in mermaids. So far as that goes, some people believe in them still. " SEEING THE SEA-SERPENT 101 66 Uncle George," exclaimed the boy in surprise, " surely they don't! " 6 ' Oh, yes, they do, ' ' the professor replied. ' ' In the year 1903 that's not so long ago two girls who lived on the Island of Sark, one of the Chan- nel Islands, off the north coast of France, came hurrying to the house of the village clergyman, telling him that they had found a baby with a fish's tail on a beach, and that it was swimming in a pool of water. They were going to pick it up, they said, but when one of the girls put her hand down toward it, the supposed baby opened its mouth and showed a row of sharp teeth like a fish." " But they couldn't have seen any such thing! " declared the boy. ' 1 1 know enough for that. ' ' " Wait a bit," came the warning answer; " you haven't heard all the story yet. The minister or abbe, who seems to have been an inquisitive fellow, hurried to the place with the two girls. There, in a rock pool, as he described it in a com- munication to some local scientific society, he found a mermaid, a little creature not quite three feet long, but looking more like an old woman than a baby, as the girls had described it. He remarks, in his letter, in a certain naive way, that the mer- 102 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS maid did not seem to understand either English or French. Thinking that she might be bewitched, he baptized her, then and there." ' ' Baptized her ! ' ' said Perry, in surprise. " What for! Did he think she could go to church on a tail?" " Perhaps he thought it best to be on the safe side," was the reply. " Now here is a point that gives a curious twist of apparent truth to the story. The abbe added that the christening did not seem to make any difference. If he really wanted to color the tale, there was his chance to make a miracle out of it. " In his half-scientific account of the occurrence, the abbe stated that the mermaid breathed like a woman, not a fish. Although warned by the girls, he tried to pick up the strange creature, but she fastened her teeth savagely in his arm, and when he tried to shake her off, she hung on, letting go her hold suddenly when free from the rock-bound pool in which she had been a prisoner. Falling on the flat ledges of the rocks, she shuffled rapidly to the sea, plunged in and was gone. The doctor who cauterized the abbe's arm added a statement concerning the unusual character of the bite." SEEING THE SEA-SERPENT 103 " That's 'a fishy tale! " exclaimed the boy de- risively. " It does sound a bit queer," the professor ad- mitted, " and yet, it's not so long ago since Har- vard University had in its museum a ' specimen ' of a mermaid." "What was it? " " It was a mummied young monkey down to the waist sewed on to the tail of a fish, the monkey's body being all covered with fish scales. It was a marvelous piece of Japanese workmanship, and the naturalists accepted it as truth." " What a fake! " exclaimed the boy. " I won- der if there 's anything like that in our Museum at home. ' ' " Probably not. I doubt if a hoax like that could be worked nowadays," the professor re- sponded, rising from his deck-chair as the bugler blew the call to dinner. All through their trip along the Mediterranean, Perry became a howitzer of questions and kept Antoine and his uncle busy every moment that they were on deck. One of the things which espe- cially caught the lad's imagination was his friend Antoine 's picture of the constant risings and fall- ings of the great sea on which they were travel- 104 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS ing, so that Perry began to think of the Mediter- ranean as a huge pond which came and went with changes in geology, being sometimes like a puddle in the roadside on a showery day, and sometimes a vast ocean which linked together the waters of the world. Antoine had whiled away many hours of the trip modeling in clay, while the boy watched his skillful fingers the Belgian was an excel- lent sculptor and so, when one day, he undertook to explain to Perry the geological changes in the Mediterranean, he brought up one of his modeling boards. Spreading on it a lump of clay, he smoothed it out and began the story of the forma- tion and changes of the great inland sea. " At first the world was all fire, all fire," he said, spreading his hands above the board, ' ' thick hot mists, so dense that the sun could not shine through, so hot that the rain could not fall as water, but was turned to steam as it came near the white-hot earth. There was no land, and no sea, then. The earth was without form, and void. So hundreds of millions of years went by. " After a long time, so long a time that we can- not even guess how long, the earth began to get a little cooler, and a crust was formed. This was the beginning of land. As yet it was only a shell SEEING THE SEA-SERPENT 105 that vibrated like a boiler-skin, a land bordered on every side by oceans that hissed and steamed. " Antoine swept his hand across the clay, until only the thinnest layer lay on the surface of the board. " So land began," he repeated. " But the crust was very thin. Even the attraction of the moon, which causes the tides, would rip the crust across, the molten rock would well up through the fissures, and the whole world was aglare with fire shining red and reflected on the low-hung clouds of swirling steam. Every century the skin of land grew slightly thicker, though wrinkled and crum- pled by the constant .wrench and cleavage, first by the daily tides, then by the spring tides, and at last it remained steadfast, save when the fre- quent volcanic eruptions and earthquakes cracked the crust across." " It must have been awfully thin! " exclaimed the listener. " Compared with the size of the earth, that first crust was thinner than a tissue made of spid- ers' webs around a baseball," was Antoine 's re- ply. " Little by little it grew thicker, however, until parts of it were strong enough to resist the tides. Over these stretches of land, which were 106 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS the first continents, the radiation of heat grew less, and when the mist from the upper air con- densed into rain, it was allowed to fall, instead of being turned into steam, and reached the earth at last, to lie there a bubbling and seething body of water, almost boiling hot. These were the first river and lake systems of the world. All, of course, have gone ; the world has been made over, many, many times." " There was no life then, I suppose? " hazarded the boy. " Not at first, no, no. But, even to-day, tiny one-celled plants have been found living in hot springs (170) that are not far from boiling point, and it must have been at some early time in that ocean, as it grew cooler, that life began." " And whereabouts was that first continent? " " No one knows, no one," was the answer. " The largest outcrop of the oldest or Archaean rocks is in Canada, where the great Laurentian Eange tells the story of the fire-made earth in its granite and gneiss deposits. All that had been deposited upon those rocks has been washed away and the old formation is laid bare. Then, as the land and seas cooled further, the hot steaming mists condensed the water that for so many mil- SEEING THE SEA-SERPENT 107 lions of years had hung in clouds of vapor over the earth and torrential rains began to fall. Thus the huge shallow oceans spread over the globe, leaving very little land. This was the Cambrian Period, the oldest of the six divisions of the Paleo- zoic Era. You know what ' paleozoic ' means, Perry? " " Sure," answered the boy, " the oldest life." " Eight, right. Now, in the Cambrian Period, all the present Mediterranean was upheaved, part of an early continent that included all of Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia. Western Europe was a shallow sea. In the next Period, the Ordovician, there was a further change and leveling. The Atlantic reached as far as what is now Italy, while Greece and Asia Minor were its coast lands. Siberia was sea, then, Perry, and the Indian Ocean was land." The lad passed his hand in a puzzled way across his forehead. "It's hard enough to remember geography now," he said, " but it would be fierce if a chap had to know all that ancient stuff as well ! ' ' Antoine laughed and swept his hand again across the clay. " You wouldn't have to learn much geography 108 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS around this part of the world during the next stage, the Silurian Period/' he said, " because it was all sea. But," and his fingers modeled a plateau, " at the end of the Silurian Period the land rose again, and when all these changes were complete, two things had happened. Fish had evolved in the sea, and plants had appeared on the land. " Then," he continued, " came the Devonian Period, when the Old Bed Sandstone was laid down under the sea. Curiously enough, Perry, except for a small range of hills in Scotland and for parts of Norway, the only high land in Eu- rope was the part that is now the bed of the Mediterranean Sea, the very land over which we are at present sailing," and he pointed over the vessel's side. 66 All through the Devonian Period and the next, that of the Coal Forests or the Carbonif- erous, the sea ate steadily into the land, the big Mediterranean island was cut in two, and nearly all the world became a dull, hot, dank marsh, with mosses a hundred feet high and huge horse-tails five feet in circumference. There were no sea- sons then, summer and winter were the same. There was no movement except the sluggish SEEING THE SEA-SERPENT 109 crawling of a giant salamander or the flight of a large primitive insect. Not a spot of color ex- isted, not the song of a single bird. The Car- boniferous Period ended with the whole of Europe one sinister and gloomy marsh, the giant vegeta- tion of which became the coal we use to-day." " Is that why we sometimes find things that look like fern-leaves in coal? " queried Perry. 66 Yes, yes, they are fern leaves, for in the Coal Forests were many kinds of primitive ferns. " Then came the Permian revolution," and An- toine's nimble fingers began to put the clay in great masses on his board. " Eeal mountain ranges began. The swamps awoke from the dark sleep of the Coal-Forest time and reared them- selves into plateaus, the shallow seas were hurled into deeper beds, and though the Mediterranean again became a sea, yet there was even more land surface then than there is to-day. " With this upheaving, came the First Age of Cold. The coal-forests died, the pine-trees took their places. The marshes became plains. Nearly all species of life belonging to that warm age died. The Empire of the Fishes and Amphib- ians ended. The Mediterranean slowly dimin- ished in size and again became an inland sea, i io THE MONSTER-HUNTERS while in Europe to the north, Africa to the south and in America, beyond the Atlantic, the Empire of the Keptiles began. " The Middle Ages of the Earth had come, known as the Mesozoic Era. The Mediterranean held its place as an inland sea, as one might well expect, since it was sea during the Permian times when most of the world was high, but all through the Triassic which is the first Period of the Me- sozoic Era the land began to fall, and before it was over, the Mediterranean joined the Atlantic once again. Slowly the land fell further, the sea spread out vast arms of warm water; plants and animals increased. By the Jurassic Period there was marsh again from Norway to Africa and the huge dinosaurs became the masters of the world, living on the islands and peninsulas in the midst of that shallow tropical sea. " Yet the slow death of cold which had awaited the Fishes and Amphibians in the Permian Bevo- lution was awaiting the Eeptiles also. The Sec- ond Age of Cold was near. After the Cretaceous Period, the land began to rise, until, when hun- dreds of thousands of years had elapsed, the north- ern part of Europe was elevated, the Mediter- ranean lost its opening to the ocean, and became SEEING THE SEA-SERPENT in once more an inland sea. Then came the Second Ice Age, the second cataclysm of want and death. The Pterodactyls died away completely, the huge reptile monsters fell by thousands and all the giant Saurians had to give place to the warmer- blooded mammals. " So came the Age of New Life, the Cenozoio Era, of which only the first portion or the Ter- tiary Period concerns us now. During the Eocene Epoch began the leveling and wearing away of the land raised at the end of the Age of Chalk. Almost to the Equator, Africa was flooded. Italy, Turkey, Southern Russia and Asia Minor sank. The Atlantic and the Pacific joined then, as they would not be joined again for mil- lions of years to come, when Man should pierce an isthmus at Panama. " Then, after the Oligocene Epoch, the moun- tains of to-day began to rise. Through the Miocene and Pliocene Epochs, the Atlas Moun- tains, the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Apennines and the Caucasus rose above the plain, and the floor of the Eocene ocean is found to-day ten thousand feet above sea-level in the Alps, fifteen thousand feet above sea-level in the Himalayas, and twenty thousand feet above sea-level in Thibet. And, ii2 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS Perry, as the land rose at the end of the Pliocene Epoch, and the Pleistocene Epoch began, tropi- cal beasts and plants fled to the Equator, snow gathered on the newly made mountain ranges, glaciers glittered on their flanks. The Third Ice Age had come, the beginning of the Quarternary or Modern Period. Nor is the Third Ice Age yet past, for it is only recently that the shrinking of the ice has allowed Man to stand on the North and South Poles of the globe. " " Perry! " suddenly rang out a cry, with a note of strident urgency, " get me my field-glass, quick! " Wondering, but realizing the note of haste in the command, the boy jumped into full stride along the deck and down the companion way. He was back in half a minute, taking the glass out of the case as he ran. Already the rail was crowded with figures, but they made way for him. He handed the field-glass breathlessly to the pro- fessor, and looked, with an intensity that made his eyes burn, in the direction whither the binocu- lar was pointing. " It's a boat," he said, " a little boat; no, two boats; no, three " He clutched his uncle's arm. SEEING THE SEA-SERPENT 113 " Those aren't boats " he began, and stopped. About a quarter of a mile away, the even blue ripples of the great inland sea were broken by something black that seemed to be advancing on the ship, moving on a line that converged upon the vessel's course. Excitement sent the boy's heart thumping like the engines of the steamer, and when, a moment later, without a word, his uncle handed the glass to him, his hands shook so much that he could hardly focus the instru- ment. There leaped into view, in the field of the glass, a broad head, something like that of a seal, but poised upon a thick, long neck. He could have sworn there were long coils behind, but he could not see them. " The Dcedalus" he half panted. " My camera I" came a second crisp order. Perry handed back the glass, which the profes- sor almost snatched from his grasp. If the boy had hurried the first time for the bin- ocular, he made the decks burn on his second trip. He knew that the professor's big camera would take valuable time to unpack, so he fairly raced along the stateroom corridors to his own cabin for his own small camera, and he thanked his lucky ii4 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS stars, as he ran, that he had put in a new roll of film that morning. He could not have gone faster, hut, when he returned, his uncle was sweeping the horizon with the glass in a way that showed all too plainly that the object of search was no longer in view. " Gone! " he cried, in apprehension. " Yes," said the professor, " gone! " " But it must be there! We both saw it! " "I thought I saw" " There! Uncle George! Over there! There it is again! ' Perry pointed almost directly abeam of the vessel. The scientist looked, and shook his head. " You try," he said, and handed the glass to the boy. The lad rested his elbows on the rail to steady his shaking hands, but whatever the object was that he thought he had seen, he could not find in the glass. "If I'd only had my camera with me! " he mourned. " It was too far away for anything to have shown on the plate," his uncle responded, "and, perhaps, there was nothing there to show. Light SEEING THE SEA-SERPENT 115 plays some strange tricks sometimes. The rec- ords of the sea are full of just such appearances as this. But they are never near enough, or ex- act enough, for science to use. Still, you're be- ginning young, Perry, and maybe you'll be the first to catch him." " He might come up again," the lad cried eagerly. " He might," was the guarded reply. But, though from that time Perry scarcely left the ship's rail, even for meals, until the ship was docked, and though he slept with field-glass and camera within his grasp, the sea-serpent, if such it was, was seen no more. CHAPTER V THE MAD ABTIST AT THE SPHINX * ' ONE of the Seven Wonders of the World stood there, Perry, " said the lad's uncle, as the steamer came into the port of Alexandria, pointing to a 'small mosque with lofty pointing minarets, on the little island of Pharos. " That is where the Pharos was built, the first of all the large light- houses of the world." " IVe seen pictures of it, Uncle George," re- sponded the boy; " it didn't seem so very wonder- ful." " Yet it was the first," the scientist reminded him, " and in those days, the Mediterranean was as much dreaded as Cape Horn waters are to-day, and more. Upon that little island stood Man's initial challenge to the elements. Before it was erected, a sailor could only reach harbor in day- light and when the elements were kind, but after the building of the Pharos, Man's will blazed high above the fury of the storm. It was the fiery sign 116 THE ARTIST AT THE SPHINX 117 that Man was greater than the tempest and flaunted his defiance to the angry waves." '" The first to dare " said the boy, feeling his pulse quickening; " yes, that does make it great." " To me, that is the spell of Egypt," continued the scientist. ' l Everywhere, in this old land, one has a feeling of a world which dates back so long ago that to the dwellers of that time, the simplest things were a reckless adventure. They blazed the trail for civilization, those ancient Egyptians, and the thrill of the Valley of the Nile lies in the fact that one can see those blaze-marks still." " Where?" " Everywhere. Not only in the temples and the pyramids, but in the people themselves. It is a haunted land, Perry, haunted by Pharaohs as other lands are haunted by fairies, and the spell always holds fast. I have been here before, and still I am almost as eager as you can be to step ashore in Egypt once again." " It's all so new to me," the boy said, hungrily. " It won't seem new," his uncle rejoined. " Once you have known the call of Egypt, you will feel as though you were returning to a long- forgotten home. You will see. But you will not feel it in Alexandria. You must wait." ii8 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS The warning not to expect too much of Alex- andria came in time to save Perry from a grievous disappointment, for, as he confided to Antoine, a few hours later, during all the yelling bustle of docking and customs examination, commercial Alexandria was not an Egyptian city at all. " It's like Genoa," the boy remarked, half -in- dignantly, recalling that busy port at which the steamer had stopped for a few hours on the way down the Mediterranean, " and I haven't heard a word of anything but Italian since we landed! ' His tone implied that he was being cheated, and his friend laughed. " Yes, yes, Alexandria isn't Egyptian/' he said. " It wasn't built until long after Egypt's glory had decayed. The time of Alexandria's greatness was when she was a Eoman colony, and Borne is Italy." " Well, I want Egypt! " declared Perry, with the characteristic insistence of his years. " You'll get plenty of * Egypt/ as you call it," his friend cautioned. " I shouldn't be at all sur- prised, Perry, if, in the desert, you didn't wish many a time for this climate of Alexandria, where it can be cool and rainy and where even wild- flowers grow." He pointed to some flowering THE ARTIST AT THE SPHINX 119 weeds. " You'll be hungry for a sight of some- thing fresh and full of life like that before you've finished this trip." " P'raps! But I don't care how soon the des- ert comes," insisted Perry. " I don't think much of this! " And he awaited with impatience the starting of the train to Cairo. Soon, however, his mood changed. As the train cleared the villas of the suburbs of Alex- andria, skirting the coast, curved round the north- ern edge of Lake Maryut and struck across the Delta, his momentary peevishness at the non- Egyptian character of Alexandria vanished. A glimpse of a stream with a forest of masts and yards that looked like things of a dream, so slen- der were they, wrung from him an exclamation of astonishment. " Look, Antoine," he said, "there's the old Nile! " l ' No, no," answered the other, " that's the Mahmoudieh Canal. And it's not old, it's quite new, not a century old yet. It is the canal that has made Alexandria the principal port of Egypt instead of the old Egyptian ports of Eosetta and Damietta. The traffic on the canal is exceedingly heavy." THE MONSTER-HUNTERS * ' And are those spidery things the masts of ships on the canal? " " Why not? " " They look as if the first puff of wind would snap every one of them." " Yet they are masts, Perry, the spars of the gyassas or barges. They do look as though they were made of spider webs, but I suppose they must be strong. All the Nile barges are built that way." The tall gyassas partly comforted Perry for the noisy bustle of the Alexandrian wharves, but his content was complete when, as the train turned to the southward, he saw in the distance a camel outlined against the sky-line. He felt that at last he really was in Egypt. The train was bowling along rapidly over the outer stretches of the Delta and its alternate patches of desert, marsh and cotton field, with a few mud huts here and there, when, even above the clatter of the train, there came a hideous squeaking rattle. " What in the wide world is that racket! " he ejaculated. " Probably a sakiyeh," was the reply. " What's a sakiyeh? " THE ARTIST AT THE SPHINX 121 " An old water-wheel. You'll see it in a sec- ond. " Then, a moment later, his friend added, " I thought so," and pointed to where a fellah, or laborer, in his blue galabeah which Perry in- elegantly declared to be a nightshirt stood beside the creaking water-wheel while a water-buffalo toilsomely trod round to raise the water to irri- gate the land. The fellah looked up as the train sped by, and thus Perry caught his first glimpse of peasant labor. " When Joseph was sold by his brethren into Egypt," remarked Antoine, " he probably saw sakiyehs being worked just that way. Very little has changed since." " And those mud huts? " " The Children of Israel made bricks without straw," the other reminded him. " Bricks are only baked mud." Perry stared out of the window, thinking. What the professor had said, came back to him "blaze-marks along the trail to civilization." That was the trick of Egypt. The landscape was flat and uninteresting. As the train sped on, there was less desert and less marsh, the cultivated cotton fields grew thicker, 122 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS there were more mud huts. Here and there a cluster of huts centered around a small mosque, with its graceful minaret. Occasionally small structures which Antoine told him were saints' tombs broke the level, but aside from these, the lands of the Nile delta were level and monotonous. Yet, in spite of all, they were curiously vibrating, and after a while Perry realized that this was due to the sun, which flooded the country with a light so intense that it seemed brighter than sun- light. The train roared across a sluggish stream, with a gyassa in full sail upon it. " The Eosetta branch of the Nile," said An- toine. Perry had nothing to say. It was not the pic- ture he had formed in his mind of the Nile, but there was something about it, something in- calculably old, as though the river were very aged and had fallen asleep. On the other side of the Eosetta branch, all the land was under cultiva- tion. Cotton-cleaning mills, dotted here and there, took away even the quiet romance of the first part of the journey, and Perry was glad when at Bulak they crossed the Nile proper and the train sped swiftly on its way to Cairo. THE ARTIST AT THE SPHINX 123 " Don't get disappointed in Cairo right away," said Antoine to him, as they neared the suburbs. " Cairo is one of the most picturesque cities in the world, but not around the railway station, nor near the hotel. We 're going to be in Cairo several days, so you will have a chance to see all you want of it." But this time Perry was not disappointed. The railway station could not be other but mod- ern, but in the throngs about it there was so much movement, so much color, so much flavor of the East that the boy breathed a great sigh of relief. It was all true. He was not dreaming. The world of the Orient was not all made new. The City of the Arabian Nights was still full of mys- tery. He climbed into a two-horse arabeah with Antoine, all a-quiver with excitement, was driven to the hotel, and, after the four-hour journey in the train, was eager to be up and doing. At lunch his uncle said, " Perry, I am going to be busy all this after- noon, and if you want to do some sight-seeing, now's your chance. Ill leave you in Antoine 's charge, and you'd better stick close to him, for Cairo's the easiest city to get lost in that I know." He turned to Antoine. 124 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS " You know Cairo, I think? " " Many years ago I knew it well," the other answered. The professor smiled. ' l If you had known it well many hundred years ago," he said, " it would do just as well. The places worth seeing haven't changed." Once out of the European section, and in the Arab quarter, Perry found the real city of his imaginings, with its queer crooked streets, blind walls and a maze of windows masked with wooden trellis-work through which one could look outside from within, but not inside from without. Perry plied Antoine with questions almost without ceas- ing, and it was a very weary guide who safely de- posited a much-excited boy in the hotel shortly before dinner-time. The lad was eager to go out again in the evening, but sleep took precedence, and he rioted in dreams till morning. The next day, again with Antoijie, Perry went to see the great citadel, which had been built by Saladin, the Saracen conqueror immortalized in " The Talisman." He visited the great Moham- medan university, entered a score of mosques, in every case leaving his shoes outside as is required by custom, and took particular delight in one old THE ARTIST AT THE SPHINX 125 place known as the " Needle's Eye," which had been walled up recently. " Why was it closed, Antoine? " he asked. His informant smiled. " There was a tradition," was the reply, " that although it was quite narrow, every one who was honest could squeeze through. Ismail, one of the governors, was very stout, and, evidently having more faith in the laws of physics than in super- stition, decided that he would not put his repu- tation for honesty to the test of his bulk. Ac- cordingly he had it walled up." Under Antoine's guidance, Perry quickly saw most of the worth-while parts of Cairo, and his cup of delight brimmed over when his guide se- cured permission for him to see Cairo at night, and took him through the old bazaars, agleam with light and merriment. Antoine skillfully guided him through the unspoiled native quarters, and avoided the half-and-half tourist section where a forced and unnatural gayety gives strangers a false idea of the old capital of Egypt under the caliphs. " Perry," said his uncle to him the following morning, " you'd better come along with me to- day. I've had good news. The Survey is going 126 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS to lend me much of their equipment and one of their experts will accompany us. The Viceroy has been exceedingly kind and given me every oppor- tunity I could have wished, and instead of being compelled to spend a week in Cairo, we're going to start over the desert to-morrow. " " How are we going, Uncle George? " " On camels." " On camels! " Only the fact that he was at- tached to a Museum expedition kept Perry from doing a war-dance on the spot. " And am I go- ing to ride on a camel? " " You're certainly not going to ride on any- thing else. What do you suppose you're going to ride, a broncho? You seem to forget that this is Egypt, my boy." " But a camel, a real, live camel. Gee! " " Maybe you won't like it so well after a while," retorted his uncle with a grim smile. He had rid- den camels before. "Oh, won't I!" 4i We'll see to-morrow night." " Why, Uncle George? Do they buck? " " I never saw a camel try to buck," the pro- fessor answered. " On the whole, I think it's fortunate they've never learned the trick. Here's THE ARTIST AT THE SPHINX 127 the camel market now. Tell me what you think of them, Perry." It might have been the camel market, but it sounded like Bedlam. No sooner did the profes- sor appear than the camel-drivers were round him like a swarm of flies, and the Egyptian Sur- vey expert, who had arranged to meet him there, had to shoulder the natives away like sheep in order to get through to his friend. A nearer view of the camels decided Perry that the Ship of the Desert did not look nearly as peaceful in real life as in pictures. The beasts had an ugly trick of lifting the upper lip and showing big teeth that was quite disconcerting. Nor did the boy fail to note that a number of the camels were strongly muzzled. ' ' Do camels bite, Uncle George ? ' ' Perry asked, as soon as the palaver was over, and the Survey expert had not only chosen the camels he wanted but also driven off the men who had not been hired a much harder task. " Some of them do," was the reply. " A camel can be one of the most vicious beasts of burden in the world. You remember Kipling's famous verses about the ' 'oont, the commissariat 'oont! ' " i 2 8 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS " No," honestly answered Perry, " I don't." 11 Learn them when you get home," advised the professor, " there's probably a copy in the hotel library. It'll give you something to say to- morrow, when you want to express your feelings. I know camels ! ' 9 " Never you mind, Perry," said the govern- ment survey expert, who was to join the expedi- tion, a keen young fellow named Arnold Wyr, "I've picked out a bunch that won't give much trouble. But your uncle's right about camels. As a general rule, they're a jolly mean beast to handle. Still, desert work is impossible without them." " Couldn't donkeys do instead? " The other shook his head. " A donkey can get along on poor pickings, when it comes to food, but he's got to have water, you know. No, for desert work, the camel is the only creature that can stand it. A day without water doesn't hurt a camel, but it will cripple a donkey and kill a horse. The camel is well- enough suited to his job, but he's not a bally arm- chair. I hope you're jolly well seasoned." "Why? " asked the boy. " Because you need to be, in order to stand THE ARTIST AT THE SPHINX 129 your first few hours on camel back. You'd bet- ter take a jolly good rest to-day. " " I wasn't planning to rest to-day at all," re- sponded Perry. Then, turning to the professor, he continued, "Uncle George, when are we going to the Pyramids? " "I'm sure I don't know, now," was the reply. " I had planned to give to-morrow to sight-see- ing, but as we shall be able to start for the desert to-morrow, thanks to the courtesy of the Egyptian Survey, I think I'll give up the idea of visiting them now. Perhaps we'll have time on the way back." " Are we going to be anywhere near the Pyra- mids to-night I " " Eight at them. We're leaving this afternoon for the hotel close by. The caravan will meet us there in the morning." The boy looked impatiently toward the expert, who was still wrangling with a camel-driver. 11 I wish Mr. Wyr would hurry," he confided to his uncle in a low tone. " I want to get out and see the Pyramids." In spite of the lowering of the tone, however, the other heard him. 130 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS " Sorry, but there isn't even any word for ' hurry ' in Arabic,'' lie said good-humoredly. " You're like the rest of the Americans, Perry, you jolly well want everything done at once. In the East, you know, you've got to use the methods of the East." " I didn't mean to intrude," said the lad, flush- ing, " but I do so want to go. It's all like feel- ing a dream come true." " There is a great deal of that feeling, I think," said his uncle, coming to the boy's aid. " I know, I, for one, feel strange. I suppose if this were merely a pleasure trip, the hiring of camels and so forth might seem more or less natural. But, after all, this is an American Museum expedition for fossil-hunting, and I've equipped a score of expeditions for just such purposes, out West. There, Mr. Wyr, it would seem quite natural to hire cow-ponies or mules in some little jerk-water town, where there would be nothing but a bunch of frame houses, a general store, a couple of churches and half a dozen saloons. Two or three cowboys riding in from the range, shooting up the town, wouldn't surprise me a bit, I'm more or less used to that. But these bazaars of Cairo are so far removed from that picture that I can hardly be- THE ARTIST AT THE SPHINX 131 lieve that I'm really equipping a paleontological expedition. " The Englishman smiled understandingly. 61 I should feel the same way if I were out in your Wild West," he said, " and a few ' cowboys, shooting up the town/ as you call it, would seem to me jolly well like a circus performance. I should be as much out of it making arrangements there, as you feel here. But I think you'll find, Dr. Hunt, that the men and animals I have hired will be satisfactory, that is, as satisfactory as can be expected in the East. We're not what you call ' hustlers/ in Egypt, you know." " I think you English have done wonders, " the scientist replied, " look at the Assouan Dam," and the talk drifted into the ever-important ques- tion of the irrigation problems of the Nile. Perry was impatient, but he did his best not to show it, and in the meantime was thinking hard. As soon as the party returned to the hotel, he slipped away and had an earnest conversation with one of the hotel guides. He turned up at lunch half an hour later, with a suspiciously in- nocent look. His uncle, who had begun to under- stand the lad, said to him suddenly, " What have you got up your sleeve, Perry? " 132 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS " I was thinking," the boy answered, " that, if you didn't mind, I'd like to go over to the Pyra- mids this afternoon." " With Antoine? Certainly. Why not? " " Antoine's busy," Perry responded. " I wanted to go alone." The professor shook his head dubiously. "But, Uncle George," pleaded the lad, "I could take the trolley right there. It's quite an easy trip and I can join you at the hotel for din- ner." " What do you think, Antoine? " queried the leader of the expedition, and Perry felt easier, for he knew that Antoine always was on his side. " He cannot get lost, Dr. Hunt," said the other, " it is a straight, broad road all the way." " All right, then," said the professor. " An- toine knows this part of the world. Go ahead! I wouldn't like to let you roam around alone in the Arab quarters of the city, but aside from that, you're old enough to go where you please. Only, don't forget that you're to join us at dinner at six-thirty. ' ' The rest of Perry's lunch took but a few mo- ments to swallow and he excused himself from the table in a hurry. He had hardly unpacked any- THE ARTIST AT THE SPHINX 133 thing in Cairo, so it was only the work of a min- ute or two to put back in his suit-case the few articles that had been taken out. He took it to his uncle's room, left it with the other luggage that was to be sent that afternoon to the hotel beside the Pyramids, and was off. He boarded a trolley car for Ghizeh, but left the car after crossing the Nile, at the opening of the great road bordered with shade-giving lebbek trees that leads straight from Cairo to Ghizeh. One of his fel- low-passengers remarked that it wasn't consid- ered wise in Egypt to walk when there was a chance to ride, but Perry, with American inde- pendence, decided that he would go ahead in spite of any advice, however well-meant, and set out alone along the road. There is, perhaps, no well-trodden road in the world more picturesque than the road between Cairo and Ghizeh. From all the deserts to the west come the caravans to Cairo, the old capital of Egypt throughout the centuries of Mohamme- dan rule. This was the first time that Perry had been alone since his arrival on the shores of Africa, and the spirit of adventure was strong upon him. There came towards him a long train of camels, i 3 4 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS heavily laden, bringing loads of dates from some oasis far beyond the horizon. He longed for a knowledge of Arabic that he might be able to question the white-robed leaders of the camels concerning their lives beyond that waste of sand ; and started, with a sudden shock, as a loud ' * honk honk " behind him caused him to turn and see a motor-car of the very latest model come rac- ing by. He met itinerant cooks, carrying their kitchens with them, ready to squat on the roadside and cook a meal for a hungry passer-by, and the boy had to rub his eyes when he looked from them to the gleaming metals of the trolley-car line. An Egyptian cavalry officer, resplendent in gold lace, cantering towards the town, smiled at the trudg- ing lad, while fellahs in tarboosh and galabeah stalked by unheeding. Here and there a hadj or holy pilgrim passed, his green turban showing that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, the place of Mohammed's death. For quite a space the road seemed to be the highway of the orient alone, and then there came towards him a car- riage, with two prettily gowned women, probably, Perry thought, the wife and daughter of some English Government official, and these, too, smiled THE ARTIST AT THE SPHINX 135 at the lithe American lad swinging along with eagerness and wonder in his step. The shafts of white light, as they pierced be- tween the interstices of the trees were dazzling, so bright, indeed, that the light seemed to hide rather than to reveal. Perry overtook an old man, evidently an artist, with portable easel and canvas, who was walking slowly, very slowly, along the road. He had not passed him more than five minutes, when, before him, at the end of the road, seen through the long line of trees, a faint blue object shimmered against the deep- blue sky. In the hot and wavering air it seemed to float. The boy stopped dead. Little by little, as his eye took a steadier focus, the Great Pyramid of Cheops revealed itself to him, as do scenes in misty pictures. He stood rooted to the spot. A hoarse voice, that yet seemed to have a child's eagerness in its tones, spoke over his shoulder. " What does it make you think of I " said the voice. " It's like Euclid turned into music," responded Perry, half turning to the old artist, who had overtaken him as he stood gazing at his first sight of the Pyramid. 136 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS " H'm," said his new friend, looking at the boy. " That's quite an intelligent reply. " He walked on, and Perry, struck by something very likable in the old artist, fell into step be- side him. For at least ten minutes neither spoke, and then the artist repeated, " Euclid turned into music! H'm." He turned to the lad suddenly. " You paint? " " Not a scrap," answered the boy, " I can't draw for sour apples." " American! " ejaculated the artist, noticing the turn of the expression. " H'm." A trolley-car whizzed by. " Why aren't you on that rattle-bang tram? ' he demanded. " Didn't like the idea," the boy replied simply. " Too much like going to church on roller- skates." " H'm," was the artist's only reply, but the boy could see that he was pleased. " Are you disappointed? " was the artist's next query. " In Egypt? " "No. laitl" He pointed to the pyramid at the end of the THE ARTIST AT THE SPHINX 137 road before them, its outlines shining clearer as the sun sank, lengthening the shadows of the trees before them. " It looks smaller than I expected," Perry re- plied truthfully, although he suspected any criti- cism would hurt the artist's feelings. " That's because of its shape. You'll find it seem huge, near by." The two walked on together in silence. " Are you going to do a picture of the Pyra- mid! " Perry asked, after a long pause. " Perhaps," the other answered. " I am wait- ing." He did not seem to want to talk, and, as they tramped along the avenue of lebbek trees, Perry fell silent also. His companion was one of those men whose friendship is felt as much in silence as in speech, and the two went forward happily together. Half a mile further on, an Arab stopped the artist, and spoke gravely in Arabic. Hearing that the reply was also in Arabic, Perry strolled on slowly. The artist caught up to him again before long. " You speak Arabic? " queried the boy. " H'm, yes," the other answered. " I have 138 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS to speak it ; none of them speak the old Egyptian here." "Do you?" li Yes. H'm. It is necessary. I am waiting." Perry wondered what it could be for which the old artist was waiting, and he realized that his neighbor was eccentric, if not, indeed, a little queer. But he liked him tremendously, just the same. As the lebbek trees stopped, the road swerved round and led to a big building which Perry at once recognized to be the hotel, but the artist struck off by a path to the side, out toward a clump of date-palms. There he stopped. Before them, now sharply outlined, stood the three great and the six smaller pyramids of Ghizeh, and silhouet- ted against the sky, near the Second or Cephren pyramid, was the bold block of the sphinx. A feeling stole over Perry that the artist was pray- ing, and he wondered. But it was not a question that could be asked. For at least half an hour, the artist stood there, motionless. Perry fidgeted, impatient to press on, but he could not find the heart to leave his new- found friend. At last the artist picked up the canvas that he had leant against one of the palms, THE ARTIST AT THE SPHINX 139 and started on. Following a path that the boy could hardly trace, he skirted to the southward of the group of pyramids and halted at last, be- side a flat boulder, about two hundred paces from the Sphinx. Stooping, he drew from under the boulder a tattered blanket which he laid on the stone, set up his easel, a little to his left, not as though he were going to work, and fell into a brown study. Twice Perry spoke to him, but re- ceived no answer. At last, deciding that his pres- ence was no longer welcome, he said: " Good-bye, and thank you." " H'm," replied the artist, breaking the long silence. " Euclid turned into music. H'm. I shall be here to-night/' and relapsed into con- templation. By this time the afternoon was drawing on and Perry realized that if he wanted to see anything of the Pyramids, he had better hurry. As soon as he came near, he was assailed by a hideous out- cry of guides and donkey boys, clamoring for em- ployment and for baksheesh in other words, beg- ging to all of which Perry turned a deaf ear until an athletic young Arab, with snapping eyes, said in good English, " Want to go to top? " 140 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS " You bet," replied the lad, then, seeing that this was not understood, continued, " Yes." " Twenty piastres," the guide demanded. As Perry had learned that a piastre was worth only a trifle less than a nickel, he did not deem a dollar too much, and promptly agreed. Where- upon the guide called, and another equally ath- letic Arab joined them. " Twenty piastres," he said in a mournful voice. Perry protested. For all he knew, the whole tribe might come around demanding the same twenty piastres, and the lad's purse was slim. His father had given him enough spending money, but by no means too much. " Twenty piastres to this one," he said, point- ing to the first Arab who had spoken to him. " No go alone," was the reply. " Always two." Perry hesitated. After all, was there anything he wanted to do more than climb that Pyramid? He decided that there wasn't, and let go his sec- ond dollar with a good grace. And then they started. It had never occurred to Perry to think what climbing a pyramid would be like. In the dis- THE ARTIST AT THE SPHINX 141 tance, truly, the blocks seemed like large steps. But no sooner was the lad fairly on the ledge from which the pyramid rises, and looked up- ward, than his heart gave a bound. The Pyra- mid seemed miles high! He turned hesitatingly to the guide. "I've got to be back by " he began, when each of the Arabs grasped him by an arm and jumped upwards. The first leap was nearly five feet high! As the Arabs dragged him up the face of the stone, the boy felt as though his arms would come clear out of their sockets. A final jerk brought him on the stone. Again a swing and a leap, and he found himself scrambling up another block, again almost five feet high. A third stretch, which he tried to open his legs to reach, as though he were a pair of scissors, felt as if it were go- ing to split him in half, and he found himself al- ready out of breath. " Wow! " he said, feeling that he would give a good deal to have a hand free to rub himself. " Eoie! " cried the Arabs and swung him up another of the great boulders. " But look here " began Perry, seeking to gain a moment's breathing space. 142 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS " Easier by-'n-by," answered the Arab who had first spoken to him. " Eoie! " And up he went again. Perry remembered that he had read how, throughout all the ages, people had wondered in what way the builders of four thousand years ago, who had no machinery, had managed to raise these huge stones, for the lower courses were four feet ten inches high and sometimes eight feet long. Even the upper stones were little less than three feet. " Eoie! " cried the Arabs, and he took another flying leap. 11 That's only six out of two hundred and three," said Perry, half aloud, and he wondered whether he would get to the top as a complete boy or as two half boys. But, after another dozen jerks, which made Perry feel as though he were a cross between a grasshopper and a kangaroo, they reached the part of the pyramid where the steps were only three feet high. As his eye caught sight of them, the boy felt easier in his mind. Now he could get his breath. Did the Arabs spare him 1 Not a bit. " Eoie! " they cried, and increased their speed amazingly. THE ARTIST AT THE SPHINX 143 " Fm Fm not trying for any record! ' panted the lad. Much the Arabs cared what he said. " Eoie ! " they cried, and their lithe brown legs flashed upwards. Perry set his teeth and said no more until they reached the top. The ascent took less than twenty minutes and when at last the Arabs let go his arms and the boy had a chance to breathe, he felt quite satisfied that his guides had earned every cent of their twenty piastres. The top was a platform about thirty feet square, caused by the loss of the old apex of the pyramid. The view was magnificent, and Perry, looking down, four hundred and fifty feet below and a quarter of a mile away, saw, looking not much bigger than an ant, the old artist in contemplation before the Sphinx. The descent was even more sensational. Perry counted himself in good training and had a nervy head. In spite of that, a dozen times he was sure the Arabs would lose their footing and roll on down, smashing from ledge to ledge. Eealizing that they had an athletic patron, and eager to get down again in the hope of finding other customers, the Arabs took that fearful stairway in a series i 4 4 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS of leaps that would not have disgraced a delirious chamois, but they delivered Perry safe and sound at the bottom, out of breath, wild with excitement, and unfeignedly glad to get back to solid earth once more. Yet, as he turned back for one last look at the Great Pyramid of Cheops, before en- tering the hotel, Perry knew that he would like to climb it again next day. " Uncle George, " said the lad at dinner, after telling of his pyramid climb, " I met a queer old artist to-day, on the road. I liked him heaps," and he proceeded to tell of his meeting and of the way in which the artist had settled down to meditation on a boulder in front of the Great Sphinx. " That must have been Quinward, Mad Quin- ward, they call him here," said Wyr, who was to accompany the expedition. " I'm surprised that you liked him. He's usually jolly wrathy when people disturb him." " He was as nice as pie to me," said Perry. " Why do you call him * Mad Quinward ' I He didn't seem the littlest bit mad to me. I did think him queer, but heaps of worth-while folks are that." " But he's jolly odd, you know, Perry," said THE ARTIST AT THE SPHINX 145 the other. " He's lived in Cairo for twenty or thirty years, perhaps more, and he's always go- ing to paint a picture of the Sphinx. He goes there, every day all these twenty years, and he's never painted a line yet." " Perhaps he can't paint, Mr. Wyr," suggested the boy. " Oh, yes, he can. He's one of the very best we've got. Some of his work on the old rock- mosques can't be equalled by anybody. But, you know, he can't be bribed into doing a picture of the Sphinx or the pyramids. He's been offered some jolly big sums, quite a pot of money, you know, for an artist chap. But he always makes the same reply " " ' I am waiting,' " queried the boy, " is that it?" " That's it. But what it is that he is waiting for, no one knows, unless it's inspiration. And I should jolly well think he ought to know, after twenty or thirty years, whether he can get an in- spiration or not." " He seemed mighty interesting," rejoined Perry. " He told me he knew Ancient Egyp- tian." " He does," Wyr responded. " Oh, yes, there 146 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS aren't many people around Cairo who know more about Egypt than Quinward. But you must have touched him in a tender spot, Perry, for generally, he's awfully like a bear." " P'raps it was because I didn't bother him an awful lot," said Perry. "Anyhow, he half suggested that I should go to see him this evening. ' ' "Well, why not?" said the professor. "If this artist friend of yours is as well-informed as Mr. Wyr seems to think, get him talking about Egypt and then you can tell us all about it. ' ' " Won't you come along, Uncle George? " sug- gested Perry. " No, lad," the professor replied. "I'm sorry to say that I've got to get back to Cairo to-night. Two or three things have come up that I want to look after, in order to have everything clear be- fore starting off in the morning. I've been over the Pyramids before, Perry, you know, and it's an old story. What I want to see is fossil ele- phants ! Compared with those, my boy, the Pyra- mids are very young." " Oh, we're going to find heaps of fossils that no one ever saw before," asserted Perry, with a buoyancy so infectious that the two men laughed. THE ARTIST AT THE SPHINX 147 " But just now, I'm after Pyramids. Fossil ele- phants, later." " Put your heavy coat on, then, Perry, " the Survey expert advised him, as they rose from the table. " If you're going to sit on the sand with Mad Quinward, you'll find that it gets jolly cold here at night." A lurid glow as of a volcano 's reflection was all that the sky still held of the sunset when Perry reached the boulder where he had left the artist. Mad Quinward, as the boy had come to know him, was still sitting on the rock, but he, also, had been having dinner, for he was putting into one of his capacious pockets a flat tin food-box, and into another a flask. Seeing the boy, however, he unhooked the lid of the box, sprinkled some salt over a crust that remained, and gravely handed it to Perry. " Bread and salt," he said. The boy took it gravely, remembering the old custom that whosoever has accepted bread and salt at your hands has thereby cemented friend- ship, and munched the crust in silence, feeling something very fitting in this ancient oriental rite in the presence of the Sphinx as the day died down. 148 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS The crimson faded out of the sky with the last crumb of the little ritual meal, and then Perry saw, for the first time in his life, the up-coming of a night in Egypt. The darkness hurled itself after the sunset like a battle-charge, and within a few seconds, the palm-trees that had been dark green in the glowing sunset, loomed like black sen- tinels against the sky. The stars, as though in panic at the darkness, leaped into full brilliancy, and a bright star-shine gleamed where the sunset had been but a moment before. The transforma- tion was so sudden as to seem almost theatrical. The artist unfolded the tattered blanket on which he had been seated and threw one-half of its length upon the sand, motioning to Perry to sit down. The boy did so, feeling the heat of the sun-warmed sand beneath him and, taking his cue from the artist, lapsed into silence. It was some time before Mad Quinward spoke. " Nearly five thousand years ago," he said, in a low, thoughtful voice, " there came a wise man to the old city beside the Nile." He stopped, and in the pause Perry felt him- self slide into a reverie of life as it was in the days of the Pyramid-builders. " A Chaldaean mage he was, of the land where THE ARTIST AT THE SPHINX 149 the seven-storied towers stood wherefrom men watched the stars." And Perry, answering nothing, looked at the constellations. From where he lay, the studded belt of Orion gleamed directly over the Sphinx, and, as he watched the slow circling of the stars, he thought how they circled in the same path thou- sands of years ago. And so, through the evening, and into the night, artist and boy sat there, sat there till the sounds from the hotel died down; sat there till even the barking of the Egyptian dogs was stilled ; sat there silently, save for a sentence now and then from the slowly-moving lips of the old artist. And gradually, by word and influence, Perry slipped his own aggressive personality and became at one with Egypt and the night. Little by little, the story wove itself into his brain, while the Sphinx and the Pyramids stayed moveless and the rest- less stars swung on. ' ' He saw the follies of the temples and prophe- sied their fall he stayed the Pharaoh in his chariot and mocked his power he laughed to scorn the colossi of the gods he flung in every face the eternal question : ' What is Man sent on earth to do? ' " 150 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS Again came silence. ' ' And Pharaoh led him to a mass of rock upon the desert ' Carve there a Sphinx! ' he said, ' with face like to mine own. Thou wert sent here to huild my greatness, in spite of all thy wis- dom.' " The stars swung slowly on. " For years he toiled A thousand workmen quarried and labored at the body the face was his alone Always it was covered with a veil Behind that veil he worked within that veil he slept and no man saw the graven face behind the veil. 11 Midnight had long gone by and the chill of a night half turned to morning numbed Perry to his bones, but he hardly dared to move, lest he should break the spirit that had gripped the watcher the watcher who for twenty years and more had never failed to see the stars circle above the Sphinx. Almost an hour passed before the artist spoke again. " There came a day that all was finished A runner went to Pharaoh, and the Pharaoh came Over the figure's face was still the veil The sun shone pitilessly and the desert shimmered with the heat. THE ARTIST AT THE SPHINX 151 " They tore away the veil " Upon the dark desert settled an expectant hush. " Over Great Pharaoh, the Greater Sphinx smiled in a splendid mockery. " ' Great Pharaoh,' cried the sculptor, ' I was sent here to mock thy little greatness, not to build it.' t * The Pharaoh raised his finger The spears struck home And over the dying sculptor, the mocking Sphinx smiled still." The glint as of a black pearl over the East told of the approach of day. The artist clutched the boy's arm. " It speaks," he said, in an awed whisper, " at last it speaks! " The dawn trembled closer, and, in the utter dis- tance, a bird's faint notes were heard. " You hear" Not for the world would the boy have said that the sound the artist heard was but a bird singing to the morning. " I hear," he answered. The sun thrust up a beam of welcome, and with the first long, level ray, the artist sprang to his feet. He snatched the canvas that for twenty 152 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS years had never known a brush and feverishly, madly, began to paint. Color and line grew like a swifter life upon the canvas, strokes so rapid and so sure that the eye could scarcely follow them as they gave birth to form. The day was not yet an hour old when the artist laid down his palette. 4 * It is done! " he said. " It was well to wait. There is the message of the Sphinx! " And, dropping his brushes on the boulder, the artist threw himself upon the ground, and, in a moment, was asleep. Cramped and stiff, Perry rose and stretched himself. The sun rose over the lebbek-trees, warm and comforting. Two tourists, early risers, coming from the hotel, strolled over to where the boy was standing. Seeing that they were about to speak, Perry held up his hand. " Please! " he said softly; " he's asleep." The first looked at the artist, recumbent on the sand. " Why, it's Mad Quinward! " he exclaimed. The second looked at the picture. He removed his helmet, as though entering a shrine. " That will be deemed one of the world's great THE ARTIST AT THE SPHINX 153 masterpieces," he said reverently. " You saw him paint it ? ' ' Simply, the lad replied : " I have been here all night" CHAPTEE VI ACROSS THE DESERT ON CAMEL-BACK THE sun was high before Mad Quinward awoke, Perry staying beside him faithfully. The news of the great picture had spread, and when the artist roused himself, he found himself the center of a crowd. Many people pressed forward with con- gratulations, but the painter seemed dazed and silent. The boy urged him to come to the hotel for breakfast, an invitation warmly seconded by Dr. Hunt, for the professor, as fully as any one, had realized the wonder of that canvas, painted in an ecstasy during the first flush of an Egyptian sunrise. But Quinward, never again to be called " Mad " Quinward, strapped up his little easel, took the canvas which had been blank for twenty years, and now had blossomed into so marvelous a work, and with a word here and there, turned to the lebbek-bordered road and trudged back to Cairo. Though less than a day had elapsed since Perry 154 ACROSS THE DESERT 155 first met him, the boy had a pang of loneliness when he saw the artist go. " You'd better get a nap," said the professor to Perry, when Quinward's figure had disappeared along the sun-lit road. " We'll be going soon." The boy shook himself into reality. " What time do we start? " he asked. " At ten- thirty," was the reply, " so that you can get a bite of breakfast and forty winks, at least." The scientist had little sympathy with what he considered the lad's foolishness in staying up all night with Quinward, but he knew that nothing would be gained by saying so, and, besides, he realized that this persistence on the lad's part was a sign of character. To Perry, the whole night had been too wonderful even to talk about, and he tumbled into a sleep so profound that when his uncle wakened him, an hour and a half later, it took the lad a minute or two to decide whether he was in old Egypt or in the new. Eubbing his eyes, and yawning, for he was still fearfully tired, as much from the reaction as the fatigue, he walked over to the window, to look out over the Pyramids. There, immediately in front of the hotel, was a caravan of fourteen camels, 156 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS and among the drivers, directing operations, was Arnold Wyr. " Oh! " cried Perry, " is that our caravan? " His uncle nodded. " Say! " ejaculated Perry, and splashed cold water on his face, " we're really off! " " Just waiting for you," the leader of the ex- pedition responded. " I gave you the chance to sleep right to the very last minute." The rest of Perry's dressing operations resem- bled a motion picture film run at full speed, and in little more than a minute he was in full kit and a-tiptoe with eagerness to be away. He took the stairs two at a stride, far too excited to wait for the elevator, much to the amusement of the residents of the hotel, enervated by the Egyptian climate. " Oh, Mr. Wyr," he cried, as he dashed out, " which is my camel? " The Englishman turned to the head camel driver. " Which is the wickedest, Michawi? " he said in English, for the boy's benefit, and then translated into Arabic. Michawi smiled, showing his strong white teeth, and said, in his broken English : ACROSS THE DESERT 157 " The camel with a hurt on his neck, he is a bad one. He fights." He pointed to one of the camels which had a small wound on the side of his neck. Perry would not have backed down for the world, but he had not bargained for this. " All right, I'm game," he answered. His uncle laughed. " Never mind, Perry," he said, " that happens to be Mr. Wyr's own beast. Well give you some- thing easier for a beginning. This is yours here. ' ' " Do I get on him now? " " I only hope you won't be more anxious to get off than you are to get on," was the answer. " Yes, you can mount now, if you're ready." " I'm ready," the boy responded, and, as di- rected, clambered into the saddle, putting his feet on the cross-bar, and awaited the word to proceed. Michawi gave a shout, and the boy felt the great hump sway beneath him, giving him a queer feel- ing of insecurity. " Look out as he gets up ! " warned his uncle. Not knowing what to expect, Perry curled his toes under the cross-bar, getting a grip as though a camel were a bucking horse. This was nearly his downfall, for Perry did not know that a camel 158 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS rises on his hind-legs first. As the beast rose, it pitched the saddle at such an angle that the lad felt sure he was about to be thrown over the animal's back. He had just time to uncurl his legs and put a foot on the cross-step to brace him- self, when, after a distinct pause, the camel gave a muscular jerk and came up on its fore-legs also, and the boy settled back into his seat. The beast stood still for a moment, and then began to move. " Is is this camel double- jointed, Uncle George? " asked Perry, the words being jolted out of his mouth, as he ranged up beside the pro- fessor, who meanwhile had mounted his animal nonchalantly "I don't suppose so," was the answer. " Why? " " The way he walks," replied the boy. " It feels as though his nigh and his off sides had be- come unhitched, somehow." The leader of the expedition laughed at the de- scription, although realizing that it did give an idea of the loose, racking gait of the camel. " They all walk like that," he said. " You get used to it, after a time." " It's sure queer," said Perry, " but it's rather fun." ACROSS THE DESERT 159 " Tell me, after the halt, if you think it's as much fun, ' ' the scientist warned him. For the next half -hour the lad was silent, watch- ing the caravan tune up to start. At last the long line was ready, Michawi took the lead, the soft- padded feet of the camel shuffled on the beaten road to the south, along the western bank of the Nile, and the trip toward the desert was begun. In single file, there was little chance for speech, and Perry's desire for questioning grew grad- ually less as the camel swung into that long, slouch- ing walk, which at the never-changing pace of two and a half miles an hour, eats up the desert miles. So absolutely regular is this pace that distances on the desert are measured by caravan hours, and the average day's journey is six caravan hours or fifteen miles. Eacing camels, however, which are an Arabian breed, specially bred for speed, have been known to carry a traveler as much as a hun- dred miles a day, but these are seldom used in caravans. Perry had not been in the camel-saddle more than about half-an-hour before he began to feel as though he were sea-sick. He choked down the feeling, but it made him miserable and unhappy. His back, too, was beginning to hurt from the mo- 160 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS tion, and when, after what seemed an age, the cara- van halted for lunch, it was a stiff and weary lad who stepped off gladly from his camel when the beast knelt down. " How are you feeling? " asked his uncle. " I'm stiff," confessed the boy; " that sideways wiggle seems to catch me in the small of the back. ' ' " It catches me, too," the professor said, com- fortingly, " and almost every one else in just the same way." " Doesn't one ever get used to it? " " The Arabs do, and people who travel in a camel-saddle a great deal. But one caravan trip won't toughen you, my boy, and you needn't ex- pect it. Camels are not ideal beasts for riding, but they are so highly specialized for desert work that nothing can take their place. ' ' " I should think," said Perry thoughtfully, " they could be useful on the alkali plains of our Southwest." " Especially since camels originated there," said the professor. " Camels did? In America? You're joking, Uncle George! " " Certainly they did. The camel is an Amer- ican citizen." The scientist smiled. " If coming ACROSS THE DESERT 161 over in the Mayflower gives the right to be con- sidered one of the old American families, how about the camel? We've found his ancestors in the Uinta formation in Utah. What period is the Uinta, Perry? " " Upper Eocene, " the boy answered promptly. * ' Eight, " the professor answered. "And about how long ago? " " Two million years, according to that scale you gave me on shipboard. ' ' " Well, about two million years ago, there were four different families of camelids in America which were destined to develop. The earliest of them seems to have been a small creature called Protylopus, about a foot high." " Weren't there any of them in Africa or Asia? " " None have been found. No, so far as we know, the camel family is pure American. All through the Eocene they remained quite tiny crea- tures, no bigger than a cat. They grew a little larger during the next period, the Oligocene, be- coming about the size of a sheep-dog, but of course they were much more slenderly built. It was in the age after that, however, Perry, that the ances- tors of the camels spread all over America. Dur- 1 62 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS ing the first part of the Miocene, vast herds of long-necked camels, known as Alticamelus, or the giiuffe-camel, roamed over the western plains, and their bones are found by thousands in the Miocene deposits of Colorado. ' ' " Why giraffe-camels, Uncle George? " asked Perry. " A camel hasn't anything to do with a giraffe, has it? " " Not a thing," was the reply, " although the giraffe 's scientific name, Camelopardalis, seems to give color to the idea. No, Perry, in certain ways a giraffe is an intermediate between a deer and an antelope. Don't forget that a giraffe always has horns, although they are only small bony growths which correspond to the bony core of a deer's horns, and the giraffe's male ancestors had long horns, as in deer. But the giraffe-camel of the American Miocene was just plain camel, or rather, he was on the road to cameldom. He was called a giraffe-camel because he had a long thin neck like a giraffe. He carried it straight, too, so far as we can determine, not in that bended loop effect of the modern camel." " What happened to them? " " One branch turned into the llamas, which are now the beasts of burden in the Andes, and which ACROSS THE DESERT 163 were used by the Incas of Peru for the same pur- poses that we use horses. The llamas used to be in Colorado, too, and we have found their bones, fossilized. The other branch of the camelids crossed by the Behring Sea bridge, and developed into the modern camel in Asia, naturally reaching Africa in the latter part of that period before the coming of the European Ice Age." " But what happened to our American giraffe- camels? " " They died out. In the late Pliocene Period they were all gone from the East and only browsed on the vegetation of California and the plateaus of the Southwest. Then the cold of the Ice Age struck North America and the North Pole ice cov- ered half the United States. The giraffe-camels were not rugged enough for this, and as but one baby camel was born a year, they could not live. " The llamas had found their way to South America, over which the ice-sheet did not creep; the true camels had found their way to tropical Asia and Africa. These species survived those thousands of years of terrible cold by hugging the equator and so passed on into modern life, hardy and secure, while their North American ancestors, the giraffe-camels, failed in the Battle 164 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS of Life. So, you see, Perry, although we always think of the camel as a foreign animal, he really is an emigrant from our own United States. " " We ought to get him back, then," said Perry. "Why couldn't we? " " It was tried," replied the professor, " during the California gold-rush of '49. Some camels were imported for the purpose of carrying sup- plies to the army posts in the arid regions, but for some reason or other, they never flourished. I suppose the herd was not large enough to keep the animals from inbreeding. So the camels were turned loose." " Are there any still left? " " I doubt if there are any, now. Once in a long while, there is a report of a camel having been seen in Arizona. But the Indians killed most of them during the first twenty years after they were set free, and mountain lions disposed of the re- mainder. After all, Perry, a camel is an inoffen- sive ruminant, depending only on his speed for escape from any powerful carnivore. He is pro- tected in the desert, for no heavy creature, such as tigers, live there, and hyenas and jackals eat dead flesh. But a mountain lion would easily kill him in a fight, and a camel would have to come ACROSS THE DESERT 165 to the wooded country for food and water. I don't think camels will ever be plentiful in Amer- ica again. The broncho and burro need fear no rival." " So far as that goes," rejoined Perry, wincing as he rose up at the signal that the caravan was about to move on again, "I'd sooner try to sit the worst bucking horse that ever was foaled than have my back twisted like a double-back-action corkscrew by this queer-jointed beast." Past thirteen pyramids the caravan trod, fol- lowing the ancient road beside the Nile, sometimes on the summit, looking over the broad cultivated region where the Nile had overflowed and left its deposit of fertilizing mud ; at other times over the edges of the cotton fields themselves, always at that one unswerving rate of two and a half miles an hour. Perry sat frontwards, then sideways, then put his whole weight on the cross-piece, then wriggled around to some other pose. But it made very lit- tle difference. No matter what position he as- sumed, that corkscrew-like racking walk from side to side nipped the base of his spine. Toward the end of the day, he got off and walked. His uncle did the same, but the Englishman, who had spent 166 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS months at a time in a camel-saddle, seemed quite content. The road was firm at this place, lying in the valley of the Nile at the base of the sandstone terraces, peppered with graves, where for six thou- sand years Egypt has buried her dead, high above possible flooding from the waters of the Nile. The sandstone was laid down when the southern part of Africa was an island and all the Sahara desert was the bed of a great sea. After five caravan hours of travel, the long line of camels halted near Sakkara, not far from the ancient step-pyramid. Though the day was still young, Perry was stiff and sore from riding, and tired from missing his sleep the night before. None the less, under Antoine's suggestion, he walked two miles to the ruins of the ancient city of Memphis, the capital of Egypt in the dawn of history. Wonderful and impressive as were the old temple of Ptah and the colossi, it was with readiness that Perry turned his steps homewards to the caravan, and when he reached his tent he fell asleep without even realizing the fact that this was his first night on a caravan halt. It was almost a different lad, however, who jumped up briskly when the call to wake the camp was made at sunrise. He was out and busy with ACROSS THE DESERT 167 his camera half an hour before breakfast was ready, and when he sat down, his appetite whetted by the open air, he tucked away a meal that made a serious inroad on the provisions. " You'll have to go easier on the grub than that when we get out on the desert, " his uncle warned him jokingly, " or we'll have to build a railroad as we go to keep you in supplies.'' Perry grinned appreciatively. " I wish I could eat enough at one sitting to make me so fat that I wouldn't feel the camel," he said, " but as I can't, I suppose I'd better quit now." He winced as he got up from his cross- legged position on the floor. " I just feel like one big bruise." " Cheer up," said Antoine, " you'll feel worse to-night." The caravan started past Sakkara, following the same general character of road as the day before. To the left, lay the Nile, flowing between the cultivated fields, and beyond, the high, bare, rocky escarpment of the eastern plain; to the right, frowned the sandstone bluffs, from the top of which to the westward stretched the interm- inable leagues of desert. " That's really the plan of all Egypt, isn't 1 68 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS it, Antoine? " asked Perry, at the evening halt, pointing across the cultivated stretch. " Desert on either side, and that two-mile strip between. I hadn't ever thought of Egypt merely as a single narrow strip of land, at least, not as narrow as that/' " That is just what it is," Antoine replied. ' i Except for the delta and Lower Egypt, for the Fayum, where we are going, and for the oases in the desert, that narrow valley is all. Yet Egypt has played a great part in the world." " I don't see that it does now," declared Perry, with American opportunism. il It's all tombs. We've seen the tombs of Ptah-hotep, Ti, Mera, and a whole lot of others to-day and yesterday. Those chaps seem to have done big things. They sent out armies all over the map. They built huge temples and pyramids. I don't see that modern Egypt is doing anything at all. What's the mat- ter? " 16 Nations die out, like people," said Antoine. " There is no longer any Egypt. It is England, and England only, that lives in the present, here. Yet, Perry, you must not forget that the great dam at Assouan, which was built less than ten years ago, is a much bigger work than the Pyramids and ACROSS THE DESERT 169 a million times more useful. Egypt now grows two crops instead of one, doubling the wealth of the entire country. " "Good," said Perry emphatically; " that's worth while. But, Antoine, why don't the Eng- lish modernize the entire business? Look at that chap over there, raising water with a shadouf. Instead of swinging that pole and that weight, just to bring up a small bucket full of water, he could put in a force-pump and get as much water in ten minutes as he can get now in half a day." " Perhaps," said his friend. " But what would he do the rest of the day! Sleep in the shade? To save his time would only increase his idleness." " I don't wonder that he sleeps," said Perry, .stretching himself. " I notice I want to sleep just as soon as the caravan stops." " That's the strong sunlight on your eyes," de- clared Antoine. " You'd better turn in now." " I guess I will," the boy replied, and in a few minutes he had curled up on the rugs within his tent, looked up sleepily at the Arabic quotations from the Koran sewn in colored strips to the in- side of the canvas walls, and, rightly judging these to be piously designed to bless his slumbers, he blinked twice and fell asleep. i7o THE MONSTER-HUNTERS The next day was very similar to the two that had preceded it. Another short day of five cara- van hours brought them past the pyramids of Dashur to the excavations at Lisht where there was a large party at work securing old vases and objects of art for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. There, next morning, with the old crumbling pyramid of Usertesen I in the distance, a half an hour was spent in securing a series of photographs of the entire caravan and then the party turned its face to the west and struck out across the desert. Loaded with heavy fantasses or steel tanks of water, the baggage camels brought up the rear, the line, strung out in the customary single file, reaching an eighth of a mile in length. Now, Perry thought, for the great sand waste of the Sahara. He had expected billowing sands, like huge waves, vast hillocks and dunes. Yet he saw nothing of the sort. The ground over which they were traveling was not sand-color at all, but like a mosaic of brown and black, level and hard. The whole surface of this part of the desert was paved with small pebbles, quartzites, the boy after- wards found them to be, weather-worn and abso- lutely sunburnt by the terrific and pitiless blaze ACROSS THE DESERT 171 of the desert sun. It was very different footing from the level beaten road beside the Nile, which they had traveled for the past couple of days, but that seemed to make no difference to his camel, for it swung along at the same even two-and-a- half -mile-an-hour pace, as disregardful of the peb- bles as it was of the twinges of pain that its every motion caused the boy. The noon halt was made clear out on the desert, without a tree in sight. To the westward stretched the blackened and pebbly waste, far as the eye could see, to the east could be seen the outlines of the Lisht pyramids, small, but clear against the sky, and Perry knew that below them lay the valley of the Nile. The meal, of which dates formed a principal part, was washed down with tepid water from one of the f antasses, and al- ready the boy found himself aching for a good glass of iced water in the American fashion. Ice- cream would have seemed like a fairy wish, and, indeed, it would take a fairy godmother or a genie from the Arabian Nights to materialize ice-cream on the Libyan Desert. Suddenly Perry turned to his friend. ' ' Antoine, ' ' he said, ' ' what 's the idea of camp- ing here? " 172 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS His friend sleepily turned over on one elbow. " Why shouldn't we camp here? " " I should have thought/' Perry retorted, " that it would be better to camp near water. " " Yes, yes, but we are near water. Tamia is only ten miles away. ' ' " There's water not half a mile away," declared the boy. " What's the use of fooling that way? ' " How do you know there is? " queried An- toine, still failing to betray any real interest. "I can see it! " " How far away? " " Less than half a mile, I should say." " Mr. Wyr," called Antoine, " how far away is that village that the lad sees? ' " To the southwest, you mean? " " Yes." " About forty miles, you know. That's in the Fayum." " What? " " Yes, yes, Perry, that is a mirage. You don't see the village at all, you only see the reflection in the sky. ' ' There was an instant's pause, and then the boy said slowly: " Well, I can see, now, how any one would get ACROSS THE DESERT 173 lost on the desert in a hurry. I'd have started off to walk to that village without even stopping to think." " There are a jolly lot of skeletons of people who have done that, and the jackals have picked them clean/' the survey man replied. " Take my tip, Perry, and don't start for any oasis that you don't see clearly marked on a map. I've been puzzled many a time by seeing to my right or left a village that I knew by compass to be straight ahead. So, I think, instead of trying to reach that village you see there in the sky, we'll keep straight on and be content with reaching Tamia to-night." The afternoon march was a long one, five cara- van hours, and when at last the camels reached the village which is the last source of water for the Libyan desert, Perry's back felt as if it were a jig-saw puzzle that had been wrongly pieced together. So much had been said about Tamia as a base of supplies, the expedition had manifestly counted so much for its success on the utilization of its resources, that Perry had expected it to be quite a sizable town. Instead of that, he found Tamia to be a settlement of low flat-roofed mud-brick 174 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS houses, situated on the edge of a green plain, dotted with palm-trees, while on the other side it faced the desert. It was late when the caravan halted, but no sooner had it come to a standstill and the tents pitched than it became the center of a vast amount of attention. Perry had disposed of a very sat- isfactory supper and was busily engaged in try- ing to find some particularly soft part of a rug to sit on, when, with a great deal of pomp and ceremony, an old Arab rode up, with ten attend- ants, and paid his respects to the party with much palaver. " Who was that, Mr. Wyr? " asked the lad, when the camp had settled down. " That's Sheikh Harun Talasun," the survey expert answered ; " he 's one of the really big men of the village. " " What was wrong? Are we going to be held up?" " Not a bit of it. No, he just came to welcome us and to say he was sending a fat sheep as a present, for a feast." " We'd think it queer," put in the professor, 1 ' if the mayor of one of our western cities should send a fat sheep for a feast because some ' bone- ACROSS THE DESERT 175 diggers ' or bug-hunters happened to come in his neighborhood, wouldn't we, Antoine? " " It would seem strange, " the Belgian agreed. ' ' But it is common here. ' ' " Don't you suppose it's all a bluff," queried Perry, " one of these ' everything of mine is yours ' sort of businesses!" " I don't think so," was the reply, " but the morning will show." Next morning, sure enough, the Sheikh returned with a donkey, led by a slave, and bearing on its back a fine fat sheep. Suitable greetings were ex- changed and, a couple of hours after sunrise, the caravan was off. Tamia was left behind, the last point of civilization was broken with, and during the rest of the stay in the desert only a constantly moving line of camels could keep the expedition in water and supplies. " It's like the commissariat of an army," said Perry, when he realized this; " if our line of com- munication was cut, we'd be starved out." " Yes, yes," Antoine agreed, " it is a serious matter to be out of reach of water, but we can depend on Mr. Wyr; he knows all that is neces- sary to do in Egypt." The march out from Tamia was over very dif- 176 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS f erent country than the road over the small stretch of the Libyan desert passed on the westward march from Lisht the day before. It was low and shingly, with little scattered tufts of vegetation; and seemed to be part of a huge saucer-like de- pression. " Is this the Fayum? " asked Perry. 11 This is the very site of Lake Moeris," the professor answered, " an artificial lake made by Amenemhat III. It used to be quite a famous resort in Greco-Eoman times, Perry, and almost anywhere around you might find Eoman coins if the Eoman boys used to play pitch-and-toss, as Juvenal and some of their writers say the urchins did." " Eight here? " " Eight on this very spot." " But where has the lake gone? " " Dried up," was the answer. " A great deal more land is irrigated in the Fayum than used to be the case, so that the water from the old canal of Joseph, the Bahr Yusuf, has more work and less overflow. That canal, by the way, Perry, was made so long ago that even tradition has forgotten about it, and it was supposed to be a natural river until recently." ACROSS THE DESERT 177 " Who do you suppose made it, Uncle George, was it Joseph? " " It must be much older than the Joseph you mean, the Joseph of the Bible," his uncle replied. " It may be almost as old as the Pyramids. Lake Moeris has shrunk to that lake you see in the dis- tance, the Birket-el-Qurun. We're going to camp on the other side of it to-night. " " But I thought there was no water in the des- ert! " cried Perry, feeling in some way that the trip would not have to be as heroic in endurance as he expected. " You're welcome to all of that water you can drink," was the reply. " Even a thirsty camel won't drink it, not on the northern side, at least. And what a thirsty camel won't drink must be mighty bad water, you can make quite sure of that." " Does anything drink it? " " Some of the wild life of the desert comes down," was the reply. " I've seen gazelle, quite often, the little Dorcas Gazelle, especially. That's a tiny beast, Perry, not more than three feet high and usually even smaller." 6 With horns? " " Pretty lyre-shaped horns a foot long. You 178 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS often see them around the western end of Birket- el-Qurun, and occasionally at this end. " I'd like a head for a trophy! " " Can you reach your rifle easily? If you can, there's no reason why you shouldn't get a gazelle if you have a chance. I'm not much of a believer in mere shooting for the sake of shooting, but I don't go to extremes, and a gazelle more or less won't make much difference to the desert fauna. There is such a thing as sport. What I hate is the kind of so-called sportsman who takes a de- light in seeing how many he can ' bag.' " " I can get at my rifle in a second, Uncle George," said the boy eagerly, "but we're not going near the shore of the lake, are we ? " " Not so very close," the professor replied, " The road keeps well to the east. " Could Antoine and I break away from the trail, on the chance of getting a shot? " "I'll see," his uncle replied, and called Mi- chawi. With Wyr as interpreter a few minutes of animated conversation occurred and then the scientist said: " Very well, Perry, as long as you promise not to go along the shore to the south at all, I don't see that you can get lost. We'll be on the ACROSS THE DESERT 179 ledge above, and probably can see you, any way. ' ' " Bully! " cried the lad, and went to get his gun. Branching away from the main caravan, Perry and Antoine turned their camels ' heads away from the upward slope out of the valley of the Fayum and turned westwards towards the lake. They scared up a large pale-colored Egyptian hare, but with his uncle's warning against unnecessary slaughter, the lad did not shoot it. He asked just one question: " I suppose we have a specimen of that rabbit in the museum, Antoine, haven't we? " " Oh, yes, yes, quite common, " said the other, and the hare was allowed to jump away unmo- lested. A little desert fox, or fennec, which had been lurking near by, evidently with designs upon the hare, also was frightened by the approach of the camels and darted away in a different direc- tion. But Perry was after gazelle and nothing else would serve. At last, towards the end of the afternoon, when already they had reached the reedy edge of the Birket-el-Qurun, Perry heard a low whistle from Antoine, and saw a small object streaking like the wind along the shore. He jumped off the i8o THE MONSTER-HUNTERS camel, without waiting for it to kneel, nearly fall- ing on his nose as he did so, and though the ga- zelle was going so fast that it seemed foolish to try, raised the rifle to his shoulder and fired. " By jimmy, I hit him," cried the lad, as he saw the little creature roll over and over in the sand. He ran up to it. The shot had been well placed and the gazelle had died without pain and with- out a struggle. " Yes, yes, good shooting/' said Antoine, as he came up. ' ' Good horns, too. ' ' There was regret as well as triumph in the boy's glance as he looked down at the graceful, slender creature, which a moment before had been full of life. But he was no sentimentalist and rec- ognized the difference between shooting for a defi- nite purpose and wanton slaughter. Short though the digression had been, it had led Antoine and Perry a little distance from their course, and had taken up time. Perry's camel, too, had gone on walking without his rider and had to be overtaken and turned. The ground skirting the edge of the lake, was rougher, and the sun was sinking toward the horizon. " We'd better hurry," said Antoine, after he ACROSS THE DESERT 181 had helped Perry to secure the little gazelle on the camel saddle beside him, " I don't know this country well enough to travel in the dark." " But it doesn't really get dark," said the boy, remembering his night before the Sphinx with the artist, " one could almost read by the stars here, they're so bright." " You think so," was the other's reply. " But I've tried finding desert trails before. How about it, Perry ; are you feeling all right 1 ' ' " Fine," answered the boy, " if my back didn't hurt so. You know, Antoine, when I fired, the kick of the rifle made me think I'd got the bullet in my own spine, it gave such a jolt." " You've only got one more day's riding," his friend assured him, as he walked over to his kneel- ing camel, " and on the way home you'll be tough- ened up a bit." Passing from the northern border of the lake, the camels started to climb. Then it was that Perry realized that no matter how good a camel may be on sandy level, or for that matter on undulating sand dunes, a really sharp slope, such as the first hundred foot pitch from the lake level up to a ledge on which stood the ruins of an old temple was more than his beast could manage. 1 82 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS Following Antoine 's example, lie slipped out of his seat, none too sorry to get a change, and, tak- ing the camel's rope, led the animal up the slope. It took an hour's scrambling, and Perry was al- most breathless when they reached the first of the ledges. " Stiffish pull," he remarked, as Antoine halted beside him. " Yes, yes," the other answered. " But I think that one is the worst." The light was falling in long slanting shadows over the ledge and Perry, kicking idly at a white object in the sand with his feet, saw that it was a bone. More in curiosity than with any other idea, he scooped the sand from around the bone with his foot. " Some poor camel foundered after the climb ' ' he began, then stopped suddenly. " Antoine," he said, with a curious note in his voice, " hasn't a camel got sharp teeth on the lower jaw? " " You would think they were sharp if they nipped you," was the answer. " Why? " For answer Perry dropped down on the sand and began scooping away the sand from around the bone he had uncovered as if he were a terrier ACROSS THE DESERT 183 digging for a rat. Antoine watched him with growing interest. ' ' What have you got there I ' ' he queried. " I don't know," replied the boy, stuttering in excitement, " it looks like the skull of a seal! " " Whatever it is, I'm ready to wager that it isn't a seal," said Antoine, but hurrying over, none the less. " If you thought for a minute, Perry, you'd see that it couldn't be a seal. It's more likely " He had reached the lad and looked down. He gave a long, low whistle. " Let's get it out! " cried the boy and reached down to grab the bones. His hands were just closing on them when An- toine 's grip caught him by the shoulder and hurled him backwards. ' ' What the" began the boy. But Antoine paid no heed. His head was down in the hole that the boy had made, and he was blowing the sand away with his breath as though the bone were made of feathers. Then he looked up. " I think it's an Eosiren," he said. " If it is, Perry, it's a bully find." " Let's take it to camp! " 184 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS " How? " queried the other. " Pick it up the way you were going to 1 ' ' " Why not? " " You haven't learned the first thing about fos- sil-collecting yet," the other replied. " In the first place, before a bone is moved, it must be studied just in the position in which it lies. Quite often the position of the bones may be of tre- mendous help in restoration. For example, Perry, the legs of the great fossil swimming bird Hes- perornis were supposed for years to be attached to the skeleton in a way that we now know to have been entirely different. And, for another thing, you can't tell just how fragile fossilized bones may be. You might smash them all to pieces, just by picking them up the way you started to do." "That's why you collared me, " exclaimed Perry, " I was wondering." " Of course. Now hurry, Perry, and gather a lot of stones. We've got to make a heap so that we can easily find the place again, and get Dr. Hunt to come down to-morrow. I '11 take the bear- ings." Pulling from his pocket a note-book and pen- cil, Antoine noted with extreme care the exact ACROSS THE DESERT 185 bearing of as many different points as he could. Meantime Perry, first alone, and afterwards with Antoine's aid, built up a small heap of pebbles, on the top of which they spread a white handker- chief, weighting this down by a stone at each cor- ner. It was nearly dark when they were finished, and Perry clambered back into his camel-saddle eagerly. Along the ledge they traveled, not knowing just where the rest of the caravan might be, and, as time went on, Antoine began to look a little troubled. " How do you hurry up a camel? " Perry shouted to his companion. " You don't," was the reply. " A camel can't be taught to hurry. He'll walk and carry a load. That's about all." Perry clucked to his beast, reached over and slapped it on the hump, and did everything he could to suggest speed. He might as well have tried to influence the desert sand, the camel went walking steadily along, not changing its double- jointed walk by a hair 's-breadth. Just as the sun was disappearing on the edge of the horizon, one of its last rays caught and 1 86 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS illumined a spot of color on the ledge just a little above them. ' i No chance of getting lost now, ' ' called Perry, cheerily, " there 's the Stars and Stripes. " CHAPTEB VH FINDING THE ELEPHANT'S GREAT-GBANDFATHEB IT was with great excitement and not a little pride that Perry came racking up to the camp. He held up the Dorcas gazelle as he approached, and even in the dusk the slender horns could be seen. As soon as he drew near, moreover, he shouted, " Uncle George, I've got an Eosiren! " " That's a gazelle, not an Eosiren," said the professor, smiling. He had been a little anxious and was unfeignedly glad to see the boy safe, and in good spirits. " I don't mean this," said the boy. " What nonsense, Uncle George! No, but really, I did find one! " " Did it bite? " " Please don't tease," protested Perry. "Honest, I did! " The leader of the expedition looked inquiringly at the boy's companion, as the latter dismounted and came up. 187 i88 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS " He's right, I think, Dr. Hunt," responded Antoine, in answer to the look. * l I knew we were late and it was getting so dark that I didn't have much chance to examine it, but it looked to me like Eosiren Andrewsii." " You don't suppose it was Eotherium? " the professor asked, hopefully. " I'm very anxious to take home to the Museum a good Eotherium. What level was it on? " " On this one, sir," the younger paleontologist answered, " in the estuarine deposit, not in the Birket-el-Qurun level. That was why I thought immediately it must be Eosiren. There's not much chance of finding Eotherium as high as this level, is there? ' " Very little, I should say; almost none," was the reply. " Is there such an awful lot of difference, Uncle George? " the boy asked. " That is, be- tween this level and the one underneath. I know, of course, the under one is the oldest, but are the fossils so different? " " Very different, my boy," was the reply. " They would have to be, for almost a million years passed between the deposits of this level and that. The stratum of which Antoine is speak- A RARE FOSSIL FIND 189 ing, just above the level of Birket-el-Qurun, is a marine limestone. This level is estuarine, that is to say, it is a deposit of material brought down by the great river that flowed through this val- ley millions of years ago, and like most estuarine deposits, the fossils found in this stratum are of the land as well as of the sea. " You can understand, Perry, that in a true marine or sea deposit you wouldn't find land ani- mals. It would be as foolish to look for land animals in a marine deposit as it would be to go dredging in the middle of the North Atlantic now for the bones of a modern rhinoceros, or to scour the surface of the western prairies in the hope of finding a modern whale left high and dry." " So mine isn't one of the oldest," said Perry, disappointed. "I'd been hoping I'd found some- thing that nobody had ever seen before." " You're greedy," his uncle said, smiling; " many an old fossil-hunter has worked for years before finding a specimen of a species new to sci- ence, and yet you expect to kick one up on the very first day." 16 1 don't know that I really expected to, Uncle George," the lad replied, " but I would like to collar a new one sometime." 190 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS ' ' You probably will, and meantime, in the morn- ing we'll hustle over to the place of your dis- covery and find out what it is that you've really got" " I hope it's the one you want the Eother- ium! " " If you found the bones on this level, it's not," rejoined the leader, " you can make your mind easy about that. A dead Eotherium wouldn't work its bones up through a hundred feet of rock. But if you want to go with us in the morning to help prepare this specimen of yours, you 'd better make a bee-line for your pillow now, for there's a long day's travel to-morrow and I won't delay the start of the caravan for a dozen Eosirens. Sunrise for you, Perry, if you want to come." " All right," the boy replied, and being tired and backsore from the camel-riding, he started off for the sleeping-tent and was soon fast asleep. He had no difficulty in waking. The sense of expectancy brought him out of the tent even be- fore the rim of the sun was above the horizon, and the dawn brought vividly back to him the vigil he had spent before the Sphinx. Early as he was, he was no more prompt than his uncle and Antoine, and in a few minutes the party was off, A RARE FOSSIL FIND 191 followed by a couple of laborers with shovels and one fellow carrying plaster-of-paris, canvas, and glue. The white handkerchief, spread out on the little cairn of stones, made a conspicuous object, and no time was lost in reaching it. To the trained eye of the professor, the tangled heap of bones contained no mystery. He gave them just one glance. " You're right, Antoine," was all he said, "it's Eosiren Andrewsii." Under the scientist's expert directions, the la- borers were set at work. Almost every move- ment of the shovels was watched with closest at- tention, and Perry was surprised at the extreme care that was taken. At last the bones were fully uncovered and Antoine made a detailed drawing of the exact position in which they lay. " How could you tell at once that it was a cer- tain species of Eosiren, Uncle George? " asked Perry, while Antoine was busy with his sketch- block. " One gets accustomed to fossils, my boy," was the reply, " and can tell a great many of them almost at sight. Then, Perry, any time that you want to try and determine for yourself what fos- 192 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS sil bones may be, remember that there are only a certain number of animals which they can pos- sibly be. You know from the stratum, for ex- ample, that the bones are not likely to be those of a creature which developed in later times, nor of one belonging to an earlier stage of develop- ment. You'll see just what I mean if I say that you couldn't find a Pteranodon in this stratum be- cause all the Pteranodons were dead before this layer of rocks was laid down. " But I thought Sirens were sea-cows, things like the manatee and dugong," protested the boy. " They are," said the scientist, " what about it?" " This beast has got four legs." The professor nodded approvingly at his nephew. " Very good, Perry," he said, " I'm glad to see that you tell bones so clearly. The Eosiren did have hind legs. Both the manatee of Florida and the dugong of the Bed Sea have lost their hind legs. The Halitherium of the Oligocene Period had only a rudimentary hind leg, so that you can see how far back in the history of Sirenian development this Eosiren comes. But what makes him especially interesting to us on this trip, Perry, A RARE FOSSIL FIND 193 is that he's distantly related to the ancestor of the elephant, and, as you know, we're hot on the trail of elephants." " I don't see how a sea-cow can be on the road to the elephants," ejaculated Perry in suprise. " It looks a heap more like a seal." " Looks don't count for a great deal in pale- ontology, my boy," warned the scientist. He turned to Antoine, who was putting up his pen- cils. " Have you finished? " " Yes, sir," answered the younger man, show- ing his sketch to the leader of the expedition, who scanned it closely. " H'm, yes," he said, " that's about it. Now we'd better get up the bones." The fragility of the Eosiren skeleton made this a more difficult task than Perry had expected, and he inwardly blessed Antoine a dozen times that his friend had kept him from trying to pull the bones out of the sand by main force. First, by carefully hardening them with glue, and then by wrapping them with canvas and plaster-of-paris bandages, finally all the bones were got ready for removal, and, for the time was wearing on, the party hurried back to the camp, snatched a hasty breakfast and gave word for the caravan to start. i 9 4 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS As they moved away, Perry and his uncle turned for a last look over the level which had given the boy his first paleontological prize, and the scientist drew his nephew's attention to the ruined temple of Qasr-el-Sagha, visible in the distance. " That's an easy place to remember," said the scientist, and plunged into the history of the temple when it stood on the very banks of Lake Moeris and was the center of a busy Boman colony, ' ' easy to remember because it has given its name to the giant coney of Eocene times. If you did a little digging here, you would find many of his bones. Think a minute and see if you can't guess the name." " ' Therium ' means beast," said Perry, medi- tatively, " and the name of the temple is Qasr- el-Sagha, Oh, I know! " he said, eagerly, " the Saghatherium ! We've got him at home in the Museum." " Exactly," said his uncle. " Now you know where he comes from." " I never thought Saghatherium was just a coney," said the boy. " I saw a coney in the Zoo at Cairo, when you were arranging about this trip. He was a fierce little chap, but nothing like as large as our fossil at home." Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History. AT THE TEMPLE OF QASR-EL-SAGHA. Museum Expedition in Egypt, starting out for camp, two days' camel journey from water. of American ACROSS THE LIBYAN DESERT. The Museum party on the sunburned stony plain. Note four pyramids in distance, at extreme right. A RARE FOSSIL FIND 195 " He isn't as large, " was the reply. " The Saghatherium was bigger, and he was a fighter, too. Herds of them ran over this plain in Eocene times, and with their fighting tusks, a pack of them would have been an ugly foe to meet. Do you remember the tusks, Perry? " " I think I do," answered the lad truthfully, " but I'm not quite sure. I didn't pay much heed to them, when I was in the Museum. But I will when I get back, you bet." 11 You needn't go to the Zoo to see a coney," said the professor, squinting in the bright sun- light. " If I'm not mistaken, there's one off there amid the rocks. See him? " and he pointed to a crevice. Perry shaded his eyes with his hand. " Oh, yes," he said, " I spot him. He's hard to see, though, against the rock. Looks a little like a rabbit." " And yet he's more nearly related to an ele- phant than a rabbit," the professor commented. " As I was telling you, Perry, looks don't count for a great deal." Conversation dropped as the ascent became stif- fer. The caravan was going up the steep ravines which form the only way between the level on 196 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS which the ruined temple stands and the next bench, atop of the great cliff rising four hundred feet above them. One of the baggage camels, which had a pair of weak hind-legs, refused at first to try to make the climb and had to be pushed from behind by all the drivers together, while its bub- bling roar filled the ravine with hideous noise. The steep slopes also put a strain on the loads and many of them came off. " Seems to me these camel-drivers ought to learn to throw the diamond hitch," suggested Perry, as the second load fell to the ground. His uncle looked at him quizzically. " Did you ever throw one? " he asked. " Never," the lad replied. " I thought not," commented the leader of the expedition, " or you wouldn't talk so glibly about doing it over a camel's wobbly hump. You've got to have something solid, like a mule's ribs, if you want to tighten cinches to that extent." 61 1 suppose the Arabs know best, at that," the boy admitted. " After all, these Egyptian chaps have been loading camels for a good many thou- sand years." " Exactly. And besides, Perry, this climb is unusual traveling for camels. They're accus- A RARE FOSSIL FIND 197 tomed to the level or to the slopes of sand dunes. Except for the Egyptian Survey, which discovered this bone deposit a few years ago, probably no one has taken the trouble to climb this cliff since the days that Lake Moeris occupied a large part of the valley below." On the next tier above, Perry suddenly found a vast change in the character of the rock and saw thousands of beautiful sea-shells in the solid limestone scattered on every side. Off his camel he jumped again, and filled his pockets with bits of stone containing the shells. They were heavy to carry in the intense heat, when every extra ounce counted, but he simply could not pass them by. " This must have been the bed of the sea for a long time," said the lad to Antoine, " this lime- stone deposit is so thick." " Yes, yes," his friend answered. " The Medi- terranean came down south of this. Of course, the shore has changed many times." " What has built up all the north coast of Africa," queried Perry, " just the rising of the land?" " Partly; but a great deal of it was caused by the discharge of the mud of rivers and streams, 198 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS making new land, in the same way that the Missis- sippi is making new land in the Gulf of Mexico. But you see, Perry, as fast as the new land was made, the continent sank, so that the filling and sinking went ahead at about the same rate. Some- times the sea won out, and we find a layer that is marine; sometimes the land won out, and the layer is a river or fresh-water deposit. When we start to dig out fossils, you'll probably find land and sea creatures close together. That's be- cause when it was a shallow sea, the marine crea- tures died and their bones sank to the bottom, and when it was marsh, the land animals died in the swamp and the bones became covered with mud. Then the sea took the upper hand again, as the continent sank." " It's beginning to look as though we were get- ting into the time when the land was ahead," re- marked Perry, examining the soil. " Yes, yes," said Antoine, " you are right. And see! " He pointed to the face of the escarpment, up which they were toilsomely climbing. " Fossil trees! " cried Perry. " Yes, yes. All petrified. All these trees floated down that river millions of years ago. A RARE FOSSIL FIND 199 There were floods. There will be animals here, too, that were carried down by the floods." He pointed to one of the many bones that could be seen. " The crocodiles were here," he said, " so the bones are likely to be all separated, the dead animals having been pulled apart when they were eaten. It will not be easy, Perry. There must have been a sand-bar at the mouth of that old river somewhere about here, and when the animals came drifting down with the river gravel and sand, they were stopped and piled up at the sand-bar. " " Hello " interrupted the boy, " what's hap- pening? It isn't sunset yet! " The whole caravan had halted, as if at the time of Mohammedan prayer, and the men and boys fell on their knees. But, this time, the camels and donkeys crowded in and the lad saw that a few small rain-pools had been discovered. This unexpected supply of water cheered everybody, and it was only a little more than two hours later that the tents of the advance party came into sight. This party, carrying supplies and the heavy tools, had gone from Cairo to Tamia by train and hence had arrived three days earlier. Late that evening the tents were reached and the permanent camp pitched. It was on the wid- 200 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS est of these ledges or tiers of rock, a ledge vary- ing from one to two miles wide and stretching in an almost even line sixty to seventy miles long. The level of the Libyan desert was six hundred feet higher still, a stiff climb. " I don't know how you feel about it, Antoine," said Perry, confidingly to his friend, as they turned in for the night, " and I wouldn't say so to Uncle George for the world, but I'm sure glad to have a rest from that camel. I was just beginning to think that my backbone never would come straight again." Antoine smiled sympathetically. " I think it is the worst animal that man has ever used as a beast on which to ride," he admit- ted. " I'm stiff, too." 11 It's the worst I ever want to ride," rejoined the boy, and yawning, fell asleep. At sunrise the next day, the work of excavation was begun in earnest. Daoud and the laborers had been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the rest of the party, especially that of Dr. Hunt, who was known as " El Mudir " (the governor) by all the natives. Perry was assigned the duty of su- pervising the work of the laborers at one of the excavations and he had his hands full, for the A RARE FOSSIL FIND 201 Egyptians were as excitable as children, and at the slightest sign of a bone wanted to pull it out in triumph. They had been working with the Art Museum explorations, and it was difficult to ex- plain to them that while a vase or a statuette was a thing in itself, a bone was of special value chiefly when its relation to other bones was clearly shown. Besides which, Perry had received a good lesson as to the perishability of bones, in connection with the Eosiren and this caused him to be care- ful. " Hey! " he shouted suddenly to one of the men, who was walking off with a basket of sand on his shoulder, from the top of which a small piece of bone was protruding, " What are you doing with that? " The tone, rather than the words, halted the man, and he stopped. But his knowledge of English was not much greater than the few words of Arabic that Perry had picked up in the week he had been in Egypt and matters were at a dead- lock when Daoud came along. Perry explained his point and a brief colluquy in Arabic ensued. ' ' He says some one told him that we were look- ing for elephant bones, and so he didn't think a little bone like that would be any use." 202 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS " Tell him, then, Daoud," said the boy, " that the kind of elephants we're looking for were some- times as small as cats." Even Daoud 's impassive face could not hide the fact that he thought this a fib as it was undoubt- edly a gross exaggeration, but he translated it as bidden. Immediately the laborer put down his basket, and taking out the small bone, handed it dramat- ically to Perry, saying in Arabic: " Elephant ! Everybody laughed and the excavation pro- ceeded, but the fellaheen had learned the impor- tance of every bone, no matter how tiny, and several small but important finds were made. The amount of sand to be removed, however, proved greater than Dr. Hunt had anticipated, and it was with great pleasure that the expedition saw the arrival of a party of twelve men from Kuft, coming to ask for work. They had walked the two days' distance into the waterless desert, and it was evident, as soon as they arrived, that they were already regretting the loss of the cooler and more grateful valley of the Nile. Also, they speedily saw that the distance of the camp from the base of supplies might mean scanty rations. A RARE FOSSIL FIND 203 " I'm glad to have those extra men," remarked the professor at dinner that evening. " Are you? " queried Wyr pointedly. The scientist looked at him inquiringly. " Why not? " " I rather fancy there's trouble ahead," he an- swered. " They didn't come up in the sort of way those beggars usually do when they're looking for work. They may be all right, you know, but, per- sonally, I thought them a bally discontented-look- ing lot." The truth of this guess was apparent less than half an hour later. Daoud, accompanied by the leader of the twelve men from Kuft, came to the tent and asked to see El Mudir. He made a de- mand of ten piastres (fifty cents) a day, or all the men would quit work immediately. The pro- fessor heard them and sent them away without an answer. " You know I can't pay it," he said to the mem- bers of the party, after the natives had gone. " If I do, it'll upset the labor market along the Nile, everywhere, and every government party will have to pay that price forever after. I suppose I can give them a little more than the average, because this work is on the desert and a long way 204 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS from everything. What do you think, Mr. Wyr? " "I'll try to handle them, if you like," was the reply. " Only too glad," said the professor, and the leaders of the natives were sent for. Perry, of course, could not understand a word, but, knowing the subject under discussion, he was able to follow a good deal of that long confer- ence. It lasted for three hours under the black and starlit sky of Egypt, a battle between capital and labor, out in the naked desert, a day's jour- ney away from water. Inside the tent, reading by the light of one candle, the professor sat, in full view of the native bargainers, immovable. At last the men began to waver, and with a look of satisfaction as he turned to the members of the expedition, but which the contestants did not see, the Egyptian Government expert announced that the laborers had agreed to accept a contract of eight piastres a day, with the promise of a holiday once a fortnight at which there should be given a present of a fat-tailed sheep. The professor was a man with a great deal of dignity and presence, but this was equaled by the gravity and poise of the leader of the la- borers, Ibrahim Salim. When at last the agree- A RARE FOSSIL FIND 205 ment was made, the Arab drew a seal from the inner folds of his robe and signed a contract for his laborer gang with an air that suggested the signing of a treaty to decide the destinies of nations. With this added number of laborers, the work of excavation went more rapidly, and prizes be- gan to appear. On the tenth day, in the pit which was supervised by the professor, an excellent skull of a young Arsinotherium was found, a curi- ous creature with four horns, two of them huge, and which, as Perry was told, is a puzzle to pale- ontologists, for it was the lord of its age in Egypt and yet its ancestry is quite unknown. Four days later Antoine had the honor of unearthing the first skull of a paleo-mastodon discovered by the expedition. It was at the very close of the next day's work that Perry, overseeing the work of the men in the pit to which he had been assigned, saw part of a skull exposed. He called away the workmen to another corner of the pit, for he knew that only two or three minutes of the working day remained. No sooner were they gone than he jumped into the pit himself and began to scoop away the sand with his hands. ao6 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS Gradually the particles of sand began to fall away, little by little the white gleam of bone be- came more and more apparent, and a skull, such as the boy had never seen in his life before, seemed to stare through its eyeholes at him out of the reddish sand and gravel that had been the sand bar of that ancient river millions of years before. What could the strange skull be! Only the day before, when Antoine had found the paleo-mastodon, Dr. Hunt had said: " If only we could find a Moeritherium, now! " Could this be the Moeritherium? Summoning to his help every scrap of his knowl- edge, Perry scanned the skull eagerly for some- thing that would seem to remind him of an ele- phant. If only there had been tusks ! But there were only two large cutting teeth. Still, no one yet in the expedition had found a skull like the one before him and his hopes for a Moeritherium would not down. ' ' Uncle George !" he cried, "can you come here a minute? " The ring in his voice suggested a discovery, and the professor hurried over. In the evening light he cast a look at the protruding skull and leaped A RARE FOSSIL FIND 207 down in the pit to make sure. Then, suddenly, he cried: " It is a Moeritherium ! By the powers, Perry, you're the luck boy of this expedition! " CHAPTEE VIII THE VALLEY OP FOSSIL WHALES TEIUMPH beamed from every corner of the boy's face at dinner that evening, as the professor, usually so subdued, fairly gloated with delight over the finding of the Moeritherium skull. To- gether with the paleo-mastodon skull, discovered only the day before by Antoine, the principal ob- ject of the expedition was secured. 11 1 couldn't tell exactly what beast it was," said Perry, in the course of the conversation, " be- cause I couldn't see that the skull looked anything at all like an elephant's." " You're right, it doesn't," his uncle agreed. 16 1 couldn't see how it was an ancestor, then. I don't quite see, even yet. An elephant has tusks and a trunk. This little Moeritherium hasn't either, so far as I can make out." " That's because the animal is so far back in the line of development," the scientist reminded him. ic He isn't in a direct line, but more like a 208 THE VALLEY OF WHALES 209 first cousin of what the ancestral elephant must have been, although we haven't found any speci- mens of him yet. As for the trunk well, it's true there isn't any sign of that, the eyes are too far forward. But the tusk question is interesting. Do you know, Perry, which are the teeth that the elephant has developed into tusks? " The boy thought for a moment. " No, Uncle George, I don't," he said. " Until this minute I never stopped to think that an ele- phant tusks were teeth." " What did you think they were? Horns? " " I I hadn't ever thought," stammered Perry, confused. " I just thought of them as tusks." " They are the incisors," the scientist replied. " Now, in Moeritherium, you can see that the sec- ond incisors are developed both in the upper and lower jaws." He held out the skull to the boy. " Yes," Perry answered, " that's easy enough to see." " Now in the skull of Paleo-mastodon, as I ex- plained to you fully last night, there were rudi- mentary first incisor teeth. You remember that? " " Yes," answered the boy. aio THE MONSTER-HUNTERS " And the elephant hasn't any first incisors at all." " Oh! " exclaimed Perry, "I'm beginning to get hold of the idea. The Moeritherium shows how the tusks started." " In a way, though not directly. Moeritherium never developed tusks from his teeth. Now you get Antoine, sometime, to show you the details of the teeth of a typical mammal. You'll find that there ought to be forty-four. Although he had little tusks, Moeritherium kept a fairly complete set of teeth, while Paleo-mastodon, in order to get real solid tusks, was compelled to sacrifice all his incisors but four. You'll find that the important things in paleontology are teeth and feet." " That's what I always strike in books. Just why is that, Uncle George? " " Think a bit, and figure it out for yourself." Perry stared at the Moeritherium skull, and tried to picture the development of life in primi- tive times, millions of years before the first man walked the earth. " I suppose," he said, after quite a long pause, " it's because the two main things an animal had to do was to eat and to avoid being eaten. Ani- mals with weak teeth had to give place to animals THE VALLEY OF WHALES 211 with better teeth when the food got harder to chew, and animals that were likely to be eaten had to find ways of escape. The ones with poor feet were caught and eaten, the swift ones got away." " You see the importance of slight differences in teeth, then? " the scientist said. " Some of these days, when you think that the details of an animaPs bones or teeth are dry learning, remem- ber how here, on the Libyan Desert, you saw for yourself the dawn of the elephant's tusk suggested in the slight extension of the second incisor of the Moeritherium, or the beast of Lake Moeris." " And were his feet like elephants' feet, too? " " Yes, in a measure, but with one great differ- ence." " What was that?" " Moeritherium was a marsh animal, Paleo- mastodon was not." " How can we tell, Uncle George? " " By the feet. Then, the later animal had a trunk and the former did not." " How does that show up? " ' ' By the length of the legs and the neck. There is reason to think that the legs of Moeritherium were fairly short and his neck long enough to 212 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS reach the ground, certainly long enough, when he was standing in water, to enable him to eat marshy vegetation. There is no sign of a long upper lip, like that of a tapir, nor a trunk like that of an elephant. Now in Paleo-mastodon, his legs were longer and his neck shorter. Therefore, even if we had no other signs, we could be sure that he must have had a trunk. ' ' 66 Oh, I begin to see now," said Perry. " If an elephant had a long neck, he wouldn't need a trunk. A trunk is a scheme used by a long-legged and short-necked animal to get food to its mouth. But I always thought a tapir was on the way to an elephant because of the long upper lip." " And now you see that the upper lip of the tapir and the trunk of the elephant are the re- sult of the same principle operating on two en- tirely different kinds of animals, for if you just looked once at the feet of a tapir and at those of an elephant you'd never make the mistake of sup- posing them to be even distantly related. The teeth are different, too, everything's different, ex- cept the lengthening of the lip. It never occurred to you to think that an ostrich and a giraffe were related because they both have long necks ? ' ' 11 Of course not." THE VALLEY OF WHALES 213 " Or a hump-backed salmon and a camel be- cause of the hump? " Perry laughed. " Then don't get led astray by superficial re- semblances. Eemember the importance of the feet as a means of telling on what kind of soil an animal lived, and the teeth in telling what kind of food he ate, and that will help you more in paleontology than anything I know. You'll trace some queer relationships by feet and teeth, Perry, between pig and hippopotamus for example, and between goats and oxen. " I suppose that every man thinks his own line is the best, but I tell you, my boy, I've never found anything one-half so interesting as the piecing together, bit by bit, bone by bone, of a life that was lived a million years ago, on a world on which no human eye has ever looked. Books of travel will give you pictures, Perry, of things that there are in this world only a few hours ' or a few days ' journey away, but the books of travel that you and I are reading, my boy, will give pictures of scenes that no railway train can reach, and will reveal oceans that no steamship or sailing craft can cross." That evening when they were sitting around 2i 4 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS the tent, vainly trying to keep away the flies that buzzed perpetually around their heads, Perry asked suddenly: " Uncle George, how far back in geology did flies begin? " 11 Carboniferous Period," the professor an- swered. " We find their wings in the seams of coal, but probably early forms lived long before that. Those flies, however, belonged to the group that have an imperfect metamorphosis, such as the dragon-flies and cockroaches. Cockroaches, you know, Perry, are very ancient. But the house-fly, the kind that seems to be annoying you, my boy, isn't so very old, certainly not much before the middle of the Age of Reptiles." " I wish their teeth or feet or something hadn't developed properly," the boy replied savagely, swatting at one that persisted in trying to settle on his nose. " Something ought to happen to make them die out." " Not much chance, I'm afraid," the scientist re- sponded wearily, " the fly isn't particularly likely to die out soon. He squats on a baking rock in the equator and he perches on an ice-floe in the Arctic Circle. There's not an inhabited island no mat- ter how far from all other land, that hasn't got THE VALLEY OF WHALES 215 some kind of a fly on it. He's been on the job for fourteen million years, and there are over two hundred thousand different species of fly still. I believe that when the last man lies down for his last sleep on some summer evening, there will be a fly buzzing around to settle on his nose." " One wouldn't think there was much attraction to bring flies out to this desert place," put in Perry, " but they're like a plague here now." " Flies were one of the ten plagues of Egypt, weren't they," suggested Antoine, " and I sup- pose they will plague Egypt to the end of time." " There are no mosquitoes here, at least," Perry's uncle reminded him, " not unless you bring some up from Birket-el-Qurun. There are plenty of them around the lake. But as long as the only water we get is what is carried here in fantasses by the camels, we're safe from mosqui- toes, because, as you know, those pesky little in- sects have got to have stagnant water in which to breed." " I'd almost be willing to swap this swarm of flies for a few mosquitoes," declared the boy, wav- ing his arms around him frantically. " They're in the sleeping-tent; they're everywhere." " Well, my boy," his uncle said, "if you're plan- 216 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS ning to go with me to Zeuglodon Valley to-mor- row, you'd better cheat the flies and take a good long sleep. You think your backbone over which you made such a howl is sufficiently straightened up to tackle a long camel-back ride? " " It's a little sore still, even after two weeks' rest," the boy admitted honestly, " but I'd want to go if it were twice as sore." " No use reasoning with a lad when he's set," his uncle commented, shrugging his shoulders. 1 1 All right, then, be ready early in the morning. ' ' An hour after sunrise the party of three started off, Dr. Hunt, Perry and the chief camel-driver, with two camels carrying water and provisions. It was not until the party was well on its way that Perry realized that this was no idle and easy jaunt. The best and the fastest camels had been picked for the trip. Seventy-six miles had to be covered, thirty-eight each way, and there was nothing remotely resembling a trail. By lunch-time the party had descended over the various benches and declivities to the level of the lake of Birket-el-Qurun and the noon-day halt was made near the western border of the lake. Bough stony country with numerous sand dunes then con- fronted the party. Traveling at forced speed, one THE VALLEY OF WHALES 217 of the camels dropped and had to be sent back. This reduced the amount of water that could be carried on the trip and made it necessary to put every one on short rations. Somehow the very knowledge that the supply of water was scant seemed to make Perry all the thirstier. His tongue got thick and seemed to fill up the whole of his mouth. As the afternoon wore on, the tor- ment from thirst became so great that the lad ac- tually forgot the pain in his back, due to the rack- ing, staggering gait of the camel. The slightly cooler air of evening helped him a little, but his tongue was far too swollen for him to be able to speak clearly when at last camp was pitched for the night on a rock waste flecked with patches of sand. " How do you feel, Perry? " said his uncle. " Bully! " answered the boy. " Don't want to take up camel-driving as a pro- fession, eh? " " Not quite, Uncle George," was the response. " Still, this isn't a fair sample of a trip, is it? It's harder than most caravan routes, surely." " Not to a true son of the desert. Michawi, there, seems perfectly content. So far as I'm concerned, I'm willing to admit that it's about all 218 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS I care for and I think the natives were wise to name this region what they did." " What is its name? " " The Gar el Gehannem, or, as we should call it in the States, Hell Butte." " Have we much more of it? " " The worst is still ahead, Michawi says. But we'll strike the valley before noon." An hour's travel the next day brought them to what was undoubtedly " the worst of it." The entrance to the valley was blocked with high, sharp-ridged dunes, of a loose shifting sand. Even the camels with their soft cushiony feet had much ado to keep from sinking deeply into it, and as there was no possibility of getting them over with the riders remaining in the saddle, Perry had to get off and lead his beast over the ridges. Into the blistering sand he sank, even more deeply than the camel. There was a light but hot wind blowing, and as this breeze topped the crest, it blew what might almost be called a thin spindrift of sun-heated sand into the faces of the travelers. The effect was like that of putting one's face on a heated emery wheel. The camels didn't like it, either, and said so, their harsh bubbling roar be- ing most rasping to the temper. THE VALLEY OF WHALES 219 " Keeping up all right, lad? " his uncle asked him once, after they had crossed a particularly vicious bit. " Oh, sure, I'm all right, " Perry answered cheerily. " But I think they hit it off when they named this place." At a few moments after eleven o 'clock, the party topped the last of the ridges and looked down into Zeuglodon Valley below. Bones, bones everywhere. Skull, ribs, and the backbones of the Zeuglodons or primitive whales lay scattered on every side. Clear to the horizon, the gleam of white here and there amid the sun-burned rocks and patches of sand, told of the world's greatest burying place of fossil whales. Ten thousand monsters lay around them. A day's search would have pro- duced enough skeletons to supply all the museums of all the countries in the world. " The sea must have swarmed with Zeuglo- dons, Uncle George," said Perry, breaking silence when at last the sand-dunes were crossed and they were in the famous valley itself. "Apparently it did," was the reply, " for Zeuglodons had a wide distribution. Thousands of specimens have been found in our Southern 220 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS States, showing that, in those times, the Gulf of Mexico was a great deal larger than it is to-day. So thickly scattered were these bones on southern farms that foundations for example like those of corn cribs have been made of the vertebras of Zeuglodons." " They must have been whacking big," said Perry, looking at the section of a backbone that protruded above the ground. " Bigger than any- thing we've got to-day. " " No, not as big as whales, " the scientist cor- rected him. " Few Zeuglodons were more than fifty feet long." " Still, fifty feet isn't bad." " Fifty feet is a good length," the professor agreed. " And Zeuglodon was a queer-looking beast. It's hard to realize that he could have had so large a proportion of tail to so small a body and head. The Zeuglodon 's head was only about four feet long, the body wasn't over ten, and it lugged forty feet of tail behind." " Eegular sea-serpent," commented the boy. ' ' I don't suppose the tail was very big through? ' " Even the body was only about seven feet thick," the scientist replied. " With those sharp teeth," he stopped and picked one from the THE VALLEY OF WHALES 221 ground, "yoke-shaped, as you see; with power- ful paddles like those of a fur seal and with that tremendous tail, Zeuglodon must have been able to get around pretty lively." " Mammal, of course? " " Certainly." " How about its hind feet, then? " asked the boy. " I know the whales have lost theirs; did their great-great-great-grandfather who left his bones here have any hind legs? " " He did," said the scientist, " but they were rudimentary and he kept them tucked away under his skin. Some skeletons show them plainly. In the still earlier form, Prozeuglodon, these rudi- mentary forms are a little more distinct." " Why do you suppose the Zeuglodons died out? " queried the lad. " Hard to say," his uncle replied; " possibly be- cause they had too much tail for the head. So big a tail needed a lot of feeding and so small a head made it necessary for him to dine off small fish. He may have dived deep for squid, the way whales do, but, even so, the Zeuglodons seem to have been driven out by the fossil sharks." " Were they bigger than modern sharks? " " They were," answered his uncle dryly. 222 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS ' i One of these sharks, who has been christened the Carchadodon Megalodon, or the great-toothed shark, may have been over a hundred feet long, and certainly was not less than seventy-five, and his teeth were three times as big and as long as the teeth of the biggest man-eating shark in the seas to-day. They had a few score of these teeth each." " I should think they would have made it hot for the Zeuglodons." " They probably did. Those shark teeth are found everywhere. They must have made the seas a terror during Miocene times." " And then what happened? " " Who knows? Probably, like the Kilkenny cats, after they had eaten everything else in sight they started to eat each other up, and either were eaten or perished for lack of food. At least it is sure that after the Miocene sharks came on the scene the Zeuglodons disappeared. And their greatest burying-ground is here." " I'll take a bunch of their teeth home," said Perry, filling his pockets, " but what are you go- ing to do about full-sized specimens, Uncle George? " " I shall not try to take any," the scientist an- THE VALLEY OF WHALES 223 swered him. " This is a difficult place from which to transport a large complete skeleton. There is no need. The National Museum at Washington has a very perfect example of Zeuglodon. We 've already got a few score tons of fossil material im- bedded in plaster and strongly boxed for shipment at the camp, and I hardly feel like bringing a cara- van here to try to transport an entire Zeuglodon away. I shall be satisfied to make sure that there is not some species showing up above the ground, heretofore unknown to science." For three long hours in the very midmost heat of the day, in that broiling valley, the scientist and his young follower worked hard examining the thousands of skeletons that littered the expanse, and then Dr. Hunt gave the word to return. Perry was tired, the heat had made him dizzy, and his back felt as if he had a sore on each and every vertebra, but his pockets were full of Zeu- glodon teeth, and he gloated over the fact that he had been one of the very few people in the world to visit the great Zeuglodon Valley where the bones of ancestral whales lie buried, and he was well content. Exactly three hours after the halt, the party started home for the camp. Back they went over those sand dunes, with the 224 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS camels slipping and sprawling in every direction, back against the hot flying sand ; back with the per- spiration oozing at every pore and the tongue so parched that it licked up greedily such sweat as ran into the corners of the mouth; back with the lungs aching and the breath coming in quick, short gasps; back through the hot afternoon and until the great globe of fire dipped below the horizon, and darkness and coolness had come. On, then, still over the rough and stony approach to the Gar el Gehannem, or Hell Butte, using a slightly different route, until at last came camp, near the village of Qasr Qurun, where water, indifferent but possible to drink, was to be had. A score of village dogs barked as though each had a score of throats, yowled in loud welcome, and bayed the whole night through. It mattered little to Perry. He was tired to exhaustion, and lay asleep completely happy, while in the pockets of the coat that lay beside him in the tent, were a couple of dozen Zeuglodon teeth, that he had brought from Zeuglodon Valley with his own hands. The next day saw the party climbing homewards, up again to the raised beaches far above the an- cient lake, up past the level where the Eosiren THE VALLEY OF WHALES 225 was found, up past the level of the ancient temple, up the great cliffs which marked the ages during which the sea had rolled over them, up to the levels of the ancient river deposits and then over the long miles to where the peaked outline of the dis- tant tents held out the promise of a welcome. Yet it was the evening of the third day before they reached it, fifty-eight hours since they had left the camp, of which thirty hours had actually been spent on camel-back. " You're a seasoned traveler now, Perry," his uncle said, as the camel sank to its knees and the boy clambered painfully out of the saddle, " seventy-five miles in fifty-eight hours is quite a feat." " It was great," said Perry, " and I wouldn't have missed it for the world. What's a little ache in one's bones compared to doing a stunt like that!" " After the work comes the fun," put in An- toine. Then, turning to the leader of the expedi- tion, he continued: " Dr. Hunt, Mahmud Abd-el-Baqui, one of the chief Arab Sheikhs, is in the neighborhood. He sent a messenger this morning and when I told him that you were expected home to-night, he said 226 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS that he would call. Mr. Wyr says that he is quite an important chieftain and that we ought to re- ceive him with some ceremony." " I feel more inclined for a rest than for cere- mony," the scientist replied frankly, " but of course we'll do whatever is the proper thing on such occasions. Will you do me the favor of giv- ing me your advice, Mr. Wyr? I am quite unin- formed as to the procedure in such matters in Egypt." The Government Survey expert smiled. " I jolly well knew you'd want me to look after such questions in your absence," he answered, " and I've made arrangements for a feast." ' ' Do you suppose he will bring a party, then I ' ' "Bather!" the other answered. " Mahmud Abd-el-Baqui wouldn't stir without an armed es- cort. He's a Bedouin, remember." " One of the chaps who rob caravans? " queried Perry excitedly. " I haven't a doubt in the world," said the Eng- lishman, smiling, " that the very gentleman who is coming to see you has plundered many a caravan in times past." " Then he's a real robber chief! " " I fancy he wouldn't call it robbery," was the THE VALLEY OF WHALES 227 reply. " I was talking with one of the most noted Bedouins once, when we were on a punitive ex- pedition into the desert, and he said that the oc- casional plundering of a caravan was just the same as the actions of civilized nations in taking customs duties on all cargoes coming into their ports. He jolly well took the ground that the Sahara belonged to the wandering tribes and that they had a right to levy tribute. " " There's something in that idea," admitted the boy. " Is that why the chief never travels with- out an escort? " " Not only that, but one Bedouin tribe is very often at war with the other. See, Perry, here they come now! " He pointed with his finger. " Wouldn't you rather that they came in peace than in war? " The boy looked over the wide ledge and there, sharply outlined against the evening sky, was a small band of horsemen, all armed with lances and dashing along at a speed which could be com- pared to nothing but a charge. Long white cot- ton mantles covered the Arab horsemen, each had a striped cloak made of camel's hair cloth floating behind him in the wind, and a yellow and black striped handkerchief, folded somewhat turban- 228 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS wise over their heads. The chief was accompanied by two of his brothers and the whole party came on at a full gallop. It seemed as though they were going to charge straight through the tents, and Perry prepared to jump. But he kept his eye on the Survey ex- pert, and seeing that Wyr remained motionless, the boy did not stir. The Bedouins were within ten feet of the party when they halted suddenly, so suddenly that the boy expected to see the fine- drawn legs of the Arab horses snap under the sud- den shock. Such magnificent horses the boy had never seen. With the Egyptian Survey expert as translator, greetings were exchanged, and then the Sheikh called certain of his escort to come up with a sheep and some turkeys, which were formally presented to "El Mudir." In return, the Arabs were in- vited to a banquet, which was prolonged far into the night. In the course of the conversation, El Mudir happened to speak in terms of praise of the Arab horses, and the next morning, to the surprise of every one in the camp, three were sent as a gift, with the Sheikh's compliments. " Antoine," said Perry to his friend later in Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History. CLIMBING TO THE FOSSILS. Advance members of the Museum expedition arriving at one of the broad "benches," where three-million-year-old bones were found. Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History. FINDING A SEA-COW A broad bench in the Fayum, Egypt, with- V fossil exposed. ^The top of the butte in the distance is the level oi a ldtJei> geolO^tt p,er>Qd, , THE VALLEY OF WHALES 229 the day, for it was one of the fortnightly camp holidays, " I've never been up on the level of the desert. Let's go! " " Yes, yes," his friend answered, and soon after breakfast the 600-foot climb began. As they climbed higher and higher, the whole saucer-like depression of the Fayum spread before them, and the bed of the old Lake Moeris could be clearly seen. Perry realized to the full why this, of all places on the desert, should be the point for fos- sil-finding, for six hundred feet of modern de- posits lay above the exposed strata in which the fossils lay. At last, the final bench was sur- mounted, and Perry looked over the blackened pebbly waste. In spite of his former experience, the trip over the dunes to Gar el Gehannem had made him think that the heart of the desert might really prove to be the mass of billowing sand fa- miliar to him in pictures, and he was again dis- appointed. In the far distance, however, a golden light glinted across the wind-swept pebbled waste. " Are there sand dunes over toward the hori- zon, Antoine? " he asked. " Yes, yes," was the reply. " That is a fear- ful place. How many miles of sand dunes it is, no one knows. " 230 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS " You mean it has never yet been crossed? " cried the boy, with a sudden hope that there might be a piece of exploration work that sometime he might do. " It has been crossed many times by caravans, but only from north to south. There is an oasis at Kufra and camel trains reach there from the north and from the hills to the south from east to west, never. No one has dared that journey. " " But from here, Antoine; if a chap should try to go straight across there from here? " " Over the Libyan Desert? " The other shook his head. " Never! Most of the Sahara is stone and rock, as here, but the Libyan Desert is sand, sand like the pictures you see of the desert, dunes from fifty to two hundred feet high, no water, no life, no vegetation. It is a waste as large as France and Germany together, where not a blade of grass grows, and where the only living things are creatures like the jerboas that have learned to do with so little water that a really good drink might kill them, and even they only live on the edges of that desert. No, Perry, you cannot ex- plore that place, there would be no way to live." The boy looked longingly at the southwestern horizon. THE VALLEY OF WHALES 231 " I'd awfully like to try," he said. A slight and very hot puff of wind reached them, and, shading his eyes, Antoine looked anxiously at the distant dune hills. A thin curl of dust was rising from them. " The sand is blowing," he said warningly; " we'll go back." It was a false alarm, however, for the wind died down, and before Antoine and Perry reached the camp again, the slight orange light that had overspread the sky had died away. The boy's uncle greeted him with relief. " Glad to have you back," he said, " I thought we were going to have a sand-storm, and that's a thing it's best not to be compelled to face. We've escaped so far; I hope our luck holds." To himself Perry thought differently, he felt that he would not have had a real taste of the desert unless he had a chance to see one of the sand-storms of the Sahara, but, as the time drew near when the expedition was scheduled to return, he almost lost hope. The very week before the day set for leaving, Perry's laborers unearthed the skull of a second Arsinotherium, a young bull, that must have stood nearly six feet at the shoulders, carrying four 232 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS horns, one pair a foot in diameter at the base and three feet long. " Must have had some neck-muscles to carry those horns," exclaimed Perry, gloating over his find, and watching the long and difficult 3 oh of packing the bones in plaster and huge wooden cases so that they might be loaded on camels and so that they might withstand transhipment across the sea. " Not only to carry them, but to use them," commented his uncle. * ' Even Arsinotherium, big as he was, didn't have everything his own way. There were Creodonts, such as the Pterodon, to worry him. They traveled in packs like jackals and the sharpest horns would be none too sharp for defense against a pack of those." " Were they bigger than jackals, Uncle George? " " Yes, a little. But of course the biggest of the Creodonts were not as large as the great ' sa- bre-tooth ' tigers of America and of Europe. Those are not found in this ancient African fauna. But you'll have a chance to get acquainted with the sabre-tooths, Perry, when you come to dc fos- sil-work in the States. There's no lack of fossil beds there." Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History. >> THE FOUR-HORNED GIANTS AT BAY. * ' The rhinoceros-like Arsinotheres of Egypt in the Eocene Period, attacked by a pack of hyena-like Pterodons. THE VALLEY OF WHALES 233 " I hate to leave here, Uncle George," said the boy, looking around him regretfully, " it's all been so jolly and everything has seemed so new. But," he added, with the action of brushing in- sects away from his eyes which had become habit- ual after the weeks spent on the edge of the desert, " I admit I'll be glad to get away from the flies." Two days later, the caravan was once more upon the move. Back again over the trail to Tamia they went, passing by the ruined temple of Qasr el Sagha, seeing the ruins of Dine in the distance; not far from the place where Perry had found the Eosiren, and on through the little village of Kom Mushim, a mere cluster of huts on the edge of an ancient Egyptian city. Thence through fields of roses, from which the famous attar of roses is made, the camels passed and on to the headquarters of the expedition at Tamia, where an Arab entertainment was given by the Mamour of the district in honor of the expedition. Next day the homeward journey was begun. Up through the Fayum hollow, again, the camels climbed and out on the desert beyond. Not skirt- ing the edge of the Nile this time, but striking boldly over the waste, Michawi led the caravan, and the noon halt came in the open blaze of the 234 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS sun, the pyramids of Ghizeh showing faintly in the distance. The party had hardly traveled more than an hour's journey after the halt, when a queer hot whiff of air reached Perry's nostrils. He remem- bered the smoking sands that he had seen from the crest of the cliff above the camp, when look- ing over the Libyan desert, and glanced over his shoulder. The camel drivers had noted it, too, but there was no gain in urging the camels onwards, even if the animals could have been persuaded, safety was too far away. In front of them was a line of low sand-dunes, and before they reached this, Michawi halted the caravan. The camels knelt down, laid their necks along the ground and closed their nostrils with the special protection Nature has given them. Every one dismounted, and the Arabs threw themselves upon the stony ground, to leeward of their camels, covering their faces with their garments. " Lie down, Perry," said his uncle, who was following the Arabs, " you can't stand up and defy a Sahara sand-storm that way! " But the boy wanted to see all that there was to see, and stood upright, facing the quarter from which the storm was coming. Imperceptibly the THE VALLEY OF WHALES 235 wind seemed to grow hotter and still more hot, and the fine particles of sand tingled against the lad's face. The sky slowly turned gray with a tint of orange-color, but as yet the breeze was not strong. A moaning sound was in the air, very faint, like the whine of the sea in a shell. Then, without the slightest warning, with a screech the sand-storm struck. Perry went down like a nine-pin and rolled over and over, as a tum- ble weed rolls upon the prairies, until he fetched up against one of the kneeling baggage camels. To the screech of the storm overhead was added a deep vibrant tone from the sand-dunes ahead. Perry remembered that Mr. Wyr had told him that in a sand-storm all the dunes begin to move, and he knew the noise was caused by the rapid action of the particles of sand grinding over each other. The wind was terrifically hot. Sand was in the boy's eyes, his nose was so full of sand that he could not breathe through it, and he scarcely dared to open his mouth for fear that he would choke. Following the Arabs, he grabbed his linen pocket- handkerchief, and breathed through the folds of it. In an instant he felt better. He was breath- ing air that was not full of the particles of sand. But, with his nostrils choked and with the air 236 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS coming but slowly through the linen, lie felt that he would burst. Once he took away the handkerchief to get a deep breath, but as soon as he began to inhale, he stopped. The air felt as though it were full of needles and pricked at his lungs like living fire. Straightway he put the linen back, almost to suffo- cate again. Then silence. The Arabs rose from the ground, the camels opened their nostrils, and in the second it took for Perry to get on his feet again, the storm was gone, gone so absolutely that there was not a trace of it on the horizon. Only, in the distance, the peaks of the Pyramids of Ghizeh which marked the end of the Egyptian expedition, glinted nearer than before. CHAPTER IX THE MAKCH OF THE MASTODONS ALMOST two years to a day from the time that the sand-storm struck the caravan on its way home from Ghizeh, Mr. Hunt, the old merchant, looked up from his morning mail at the breakfast table and said to his son : " Perry, your Uncle George is back from Pa- tagonia. He writes me from Washington that he has had a marvelous trip in a long search for a still-living specimen of the giant ground-sloth and that he will come out here to pay us a visit." " When's he coming, Father? " " In about two weeks, he says." " My word! I wish I could get that Pteranodon mounted before he comes! ' " Well, can you? " The boy thought for a moment. ' ' I might be able to, at that. You know, Father, that Pteranodon of ours is going to be far and away the best Pteranodon in any museum in this 237 238 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS country. The American Museum of Natural His- tory in New York will envy us. I wondered, when you bought the specimen from that Kansas chap, that you didn't send it to New York." "I wanted to give our own little museum a start," the old merchant replied, " and it seemed to me that if it had on exhibition at least one thing that was the best of its kind in the world, that exhibit would help its reputation more than anything I knew. I figure that the Pteranodon will put our local museum on the map." " It sure will," agreed Perry. " How are you getting along with the mount- ing of it? " " Mighty well, I think," the boy answered, " seeing that I'm doing it nearly all alone. But I'd never have been able to tackle it so well if you hadn't invited Antoine here last summer. He taught me more about preparing museum speci- mens in a month than I'd have found out from our chaps here in a year. Why don't you come over and see it now, Father? I've got all the plaster off, and the bones are laid out on a table ready for setting together." " Very well, I'll go with you now," the mer- chant said, looking at his watch. " I'm quite keen MARCH OF THE MASTODONS 239 to see how the thing shapes up. After all, I bought those bones on faith. I haven't even looked at them yet." "It's a cracker jack," the boy assured him, " the best that's ever been got hold of. We're all tickled over it. The skeleton is pretty well cleared away from the chalk rock now, and I'm having heaps of fun making the model." 6 1 If you can manage to get the mounting of the Pteranodon finished," his father rejoined, as they stepped into his car, "I'd be glad. I'd like to have it ready to show your Uncle George when he comes." In response to questioning about flying reptiles from his father, Perry, during the ride, chattered steadily about pterodactyls of every shape and size, until they stopped at the Museum building. The boy took his father to the top floor, which was used as a workshop. Eunning along one whole side of the building was a long table, and there, spread out upon it, were a number of blocks of pinkish chalky stone. None of these blocks was more than a couple of feet long, and most of them were only a few inches in length, but from each of them protruded a brown substance which, on close examination, displayed itself as bone. The mer- 240 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS chant looked at the fragments with interest, but also with a puzzled air. " Is that all there is to it, just those little bits of stone 1" he asked. " Why, Father, what did you expect? " tl I thought you had almost a whole skeleton! That collector fellow told me there were very few bones missing. " " There aren't many of them lost, as a matter of fact, ' ' the boy responded. ' ' No, really, Father, it's a bully specimen." " It doesn't look it." " Wait just a second," the boy rejoined, " and I'll show you!" He hurried to another part of the workshop and came back with a curiously shaped frame on which was stretched a piece of brown oiled-silk. " What's that? " " One of the wings for the model," the boy answered. He laid the frame down upon the table over the blocks that contained the bones, and, as though by magic, the whole shape of the great Pteranodon seemed to spring into view. The mis- sing bones presented themselves to the imagina- tion as though they were there, for the spread of the wing showed exactly how they would fit in. MARCH OF THE MASTODONS 241 A group of little claws, that had been chiseled en- tirely free from the chalk, were carefully placed by Perry at the ends of the wing-fingers. " So that's what he looked like! " exclaimed the old merchant. 11 I can give you a better idea yet. Hold on a bit," said Perry, and he hurried away again. Back he came, carrying in one hand the companion wing, and in his other hand a wax model of the head and towering crest of the great flying reptile. As soon as this latter was placed beside the scat- tered array of bones on the table that represented the skull, their relation to each other was shown at once. Perry then laid the other wing on the table, the two great brown membrane-like wings stretching their whole spread of twenty-one feet, and making it seem as though that giant of the air had just glided down upon that workshop table. " Great guns," said the financier, " what a monster! " " Doesn't that give you an idea of his size, though! " exclaimed the boy. His father looked thoughtfully at the bones of the skeleton lying embedded in the pieces of Kan- sas chalk in which they had been found, and at 242 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS the model with its semi-transparent wings that lay upon it, and said thoughtfully: " It's too bad we couldn't make an entire hall, Perry, containing huge life-size models of all the kinds of trees that lived at that time, with per- haps a cliff and sea-shore and a few of those Pteranodons models of course flying around. I believe in that way people would get the idea of archaic life much more easily than they would from specimens in a glass case." " Oh, Father!" cried the lad excitedly, and stopped. " Well? " "It would be bully," the boy agreed, "but you'd need such miles of space! The tree ferns would have to be a hundred feet high, and the cliff two hundred feet, so as to get the perspective right ; the hall would have to be a couple of hun- dred feet square, and we'd need a different hall for each of the important periods." " About how many? " " Seven or eight, I should think." The old merchant shook his head. "I'm pretty well fixed," he said, "but I couldn't stand for anything like that. Those halls would cost half a million apiece." MARCH OF THE MASTODONS 243 " If you wanted to, Father " the boy began, and stopped. " Well? " 1 1 You can get pretty nearly that effect by mak- ing models on a small scale, say, an inch to the foot. Then the tree ferns would be ten feet high, the Pteranodons would be two feet and all the other animals would be to scale. If you worked in the perspective and did the lighting the way that it's done on the stage, people could get al- most the same effect as by a big hall. ' ' The merchant looked thoughtfully at his son. " That's a good idea of yours, Perry, " he said. " It's not my idea," the lad rejoined, " there's a chap who's worked it out for the Children's Museum in Brooklyn and the Metropolitan Mu- seum in New York. His stuff is great! " " I wouldn't mind spending a little money for a thing like that," the financier answered. " Models like the ones you're talking about are just what the small museums ought to have." " Big ones, too," put in Perry. " Of course. But a considerable part of the funds of the larger museums must be spent on ex- peditions and scientific work on a broad scale. That's their main work. But in order to get the 244 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS public interested which I think is an important part of a museum's duty to the people that model idea catches me about right. Why don't you have that fellow come on and spend a couple of days with us? I'll see that it's worth his while. ' ' "I'll ask him like a shot, if you're willing," Perry replied. "I'd enjoy it heaps! I've never had more fun than I did last summer when you asked that American Museum artist down here. Jumping Jehu, couldn't he paint! " " Yes," his father agreed, " when it comes to restorations of fossil monsters, he's about the best ever. You picked up quite a bit about painting from him, too." " I certainly did. And I'd like to know a little more about modelling," the boy added shrewdly, well knowing that his father was always willing to help him in every way. " All right, then, Perry, if you want to drop a note to that sculptor-modeller, go ahead." The financier started to go and then turned back. " I've been thinking about the missing parts of that Pteranodon," he said. " Don't you sup- pose, Perry, that the rest of those bones ought to MARCH OF THE MASTODONS 245 Ibe somewhere around? If I sent the collector another check, do you think he could dig around and find some more? I'd like to see that skeleton absolutely complete. " The boy shook his head. " I don't believe it would be any use, Father/' he said. " You see, that Pteranodon was found in chalk." " Well? " " That means that he must have died and tumbled into the water and sunk to the bottom. The floor of the seu is pretty flat, especially when it's made up of those microscopic shells floating down, so that the bones, when they reached the bottom, must have been spread out on a level. They're too light to sink in much, and as the chalk shells steadily rained down, they covered the old monarch of the air like a sheet. Then the bottom of the sea rose and became dry land. When, mil- lions of years later, and probably not long ago, rain and wind and all the rest of the things that make erosion, washed away the chalk that had ac- cumulated on top of the Pteranodon, he lay there just as flat as ever, flatter, because his hollow bones were crushed by the chalk that once had lain on top of him." 246 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS " Yes, that's true," said the merchant thought- fully, " the bones would be on a level." " Sure. So if the collector who found those bones cleared away a space a little larger than the spread of the Pteranodon, say a stretch thirty feet square, and worked that down to a level, he VI really be looking at the bottom of the ocean as it was when the Pteranodon sank down. If he explored that stretch for a few inches further down, he'd certainly find all the bones he would be likely to find, for even an inch of chalk would mean a thousand-years' deposit." " That may be all right, son," said his father, " and you've made a good case for the collector. But just the same, the bones must be somewhere. ' ' " Sure, but where! See, right here, Father," and the lad put his finger on the skeleton, i ' there 's the place where the sternum ought to be, one of the biggest bones of the whole Pteranodon. It wasn't found at all. Yet you'd think that the big- gest bone would be the easiest to find." " That's just what I'm saying. It must be somewhere. A bone from a dead bird can't get up and walk off by itself." t ' No, but a big primitive fish or a crab, or some- thing, could have pulled away the bone when mak- MARCH OF THE MASTODONS 247 ing his dinner on the dead Pteranodon at the bot- tom of the sea. Anyway, it's a rare thing when there aren't some bones missing in a fossil. In the Fayum, it used to seem to me an awful shame that the skeletons were so often broken up into little bits. But we had to take them as they came." " You'll make up the rest of the skeleton in plaster, I suppose? " " That's nearly done, Father," the boy replied. " But we're not going to take the skeleton free from the chalk and mount it.'' " Why not? " " Couldn't be done successfully. As I was tell- ing you, the bones are crushed. See, Father, a Pteranodon 's bones are hollow, like a thin paste- board tube, and the pressure of the overlying chalk has squashed them flat, and splintered them. It would be an awful job to rebuild that tubular bone. No, we're going to chisel away the chalk for about an inch below the level of the bones, soaking them meanwhile in shellac until they won't absorb any more and cementing together the pieces that are cracked and broken. Then we'll make a plaster model of the whole base, fitting in the bits of chalk we have, and we '11 color that pink like the rock in 248 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS which the bones were found. On that model, which will be exactly to scale, we'll be able to see exactly where the missing bones come and we'll mold them on the model. "We'll color them slightly different from the true bones, so that an expert can see right away which are the restored parts, but the public will get the idea of the beast as a whole." " And your restoration will be of wax! " 16 We've got a regular composition for that, and I'm molding it over a steel frame so as to give it strength. Then I'll paint it up to look as much like life as possible." " How do you know what color to paint it? " queried his father. " There wasn't any artist in existence to take notes when Pteranodon was flying around." " No," Perry replied. " But there isn't any reason to suppose Pteranodon was in bright colors and a blackish-brown is the usual thing in Nature, so I'm going to make it that." " Where are you going to put the exhibit? " queried the old merchant, as he went to the door. " Eight in this main hall," the boy answered. " It's our biggest prize, thanks to you, Father, and we're going to make the most of it." MARCH OF THE MASTODONS 249 His father laughed at the lad's confident man- ner. " I hope you occasionally consult the Director," he said. " You talk for all the world, Perry, as though you were the only person in the build- ing." The boy colored to the roots of his hair at the implied rebuke of boasting. " I didn't mean to," he said, " but but I have got the sort of idea that the Pteranodon is my pet, and they've let me work it all out, almost by myself. The Director's in and out all the time, of course." With the goal before him of having both the skeleton prepared and also the model finished and hung before the arrival of his uncle, Perry worked night and day. The director of the small museum helped him, for he too was anxious to have the museum's richest treasure on display before the coming of Dr. Hunt. Between them, they accom- plished wonders, and the day before the expected visit of the scientist, the skeleton of the Pterano- don was safely affixed against the wall of the main hall, while above him, swooping downwards, was the 21-foot model of the giant flying reptile. He looked every inch his size, and the actual bones 250 THE 'MONSTER-HUNTERS themselves, immediately below, showed how ex- actly true to reality was the restoration that had been made. When, next day, his uncle came, Perry could hardly restrain his impatience until a visit to the Museum had been arranged. He was proud of his work, as proud in completing the preparation of the skeleton and the model as he had been when, one evening two years before, in the red sand of the Eocene river bed in Egypt, he had shown his uncle the skull of the Moeritherium. But, at the same time, he was a little anxious, for the director of the local museum, though a scholar, was not an expert in paleontology. The lad was on pins and needles, therefore, when, with his father and his uncle, the car slowed up at the Museum. Perry led them into the main hall and pointed to the wall. " There! " he said. The professor cast a quick glance at the model overhead, but, as Perry knew well, it was not the restoration, but the actual skeleton itself that in- terested the scientist and he walked up to the case. Carefully, with an examination of details that amazed Perry, for even he did not realize how much importance might attach to a small groove Courtesy of J. B. Lippincott , PTERANODON, CLIMBING FOR A SWOOP*. The great flying reptile, twenty-one feet long, clawing his way up the cliff to get a start for his soaring flight ; restoration from Gregory, in "Geology of To-day." MARCH OF THE MASTODONS 251 in a joint, the scientist scrutinized every bone, and every fragment of the plaster. " Excellent/' he said heartily, " excellent piece of work! Very well handled indeed, Perry. You've got a real specimen there, and the prepa- ration is first class." The director, who had hurried out of his office on the approach of the car, heard the last couple of sentences and smiled at the boy. " Of course," the professor continued, " there are one or two small points, quite small points, that I think might be changed." " What? " queried Perry. " That crest, for one thing," the scientist re- plied. " There is every reason to think that the Pteranodon developed that large crest sticking out the back of his head as a balance. As the genus grew in size, the toothed beak of the Pteranodon became longer in order to enable him to get food easily. Judging from the bones of his neck, which you see are small, Perry, it is unlikely that he could have carried heavy enough muscles to support the one-sided weight of a heavy jaw, and the crest acted as a balance. Now, you have the crest standing up from the skull at an angle of forty-five degrees. That would put more weight 252 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS on the top of the skull and diminish the balancing effect. If you draw a straight line along the upper jaw to the skull and project that backwards, you will have the right line for the crest." " So that's why he had that crest! " exclaimed Perry. Then turning to the director, he added, " Mr. Thompson, neither of us thought of that reason, did we? " " Then," continued the professor, " I think you have the stretch of the wings a little too straight. The wing-finger of nearly all the Pterodactyls was curved." He also mentioned one or two smaller matters, but turning to the director of the local museum, concluded: " I think, Mr. Thompson, if you will make those trifling changes, you will have in your Museum here without question the finest specimen of a Pteranodon extant." " Very well, Dr. Hunt," the director answered, "I'm obliged for the suggestions. I think I'll let Perry carry them out, since you think he's done so well so far." " He has done a first-class piece of work," the scientist said, quite enthusiastically, " one that would do credit to any museum. If you'll let me have a photograph, Perry, and the exact dimen- MARCH OF THE MASTODONS 253 sions of all the bones, I'll write a short scientific paper on it and give you the credit for the restor- ation, under Mr. Thompson's direction." " Oh, Uncle George, " he said, " that would be great, but it was Mr. Thompson who showed me what to do." " No," remarked the director, " Dr. Hunt is speaking of the restoration, and I let you go ahead on that in your own way. If Dr. Hunt writes a paper on it, the credit for the restoration is all yours. Mounting the skeleton, of course, is a dif- ferent matter." The scientist was distinctly pleased with the lad's work and reverted to it more than once in the course of the day. At the same time, the genuine scientific interest shown by the professor in the Pteranodon was grateful to the old mer- chant, who, as he said himself, had bought the bones " on faith." The third day of Dr. Hunt's visit, at dinner, the scientist turned to his nephew and said quite unexpectedly : " Perry, do you know the famous poem about the Eohippus? " " No, Uncle George," the boy replied. " I don't believe I do." 254 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS ' ' You are acquainted with our little friend, the Eohippus, I suppose? " Perry grinned. " In books and in bones, " he said, " but I haven't ever met him in real life." Then, for he never missed an opportunity of trying to persuade his uncle to take him on another expedition, he added: "I'd be awfully glad to meet him, though, Uncle George, if you're going to pay him a visit." " I am," the scientist replied. " But if you don't know that little bit of verse, which was writ- ten by a clever and quite well-known woman after a visit to our New York Museum, part of your education as a paleontologist has been seriously neglected, and I'm going to make up for that neg- lect at once. ' ' And, without further preamble, he began : " There was once a little animal No bigger than a fox, And on five toes he scampered Over Tertiary rocks; They called him Eohippus, For he certainly was small, And they thought him of no value When they thought of him at all; For the lumpish old Dinoceras And Coryphodon so slow, MARCH OF THE MASTODONS 255 Were the heavy aristocracy In days of long ago." " Except that the Dinoceras didn't live at the same time as the Eohippus," put in Perry, " he came along later." " Poetic license, " replied his uncle. " I didn't write the verse. Shall I go on? " "Oh, sure! " answered Perry eagerly. So his uncle continued: "Said the little Eohippus, ' I'm going to be a horse ! And on my middle finger-nails To run my earthly course! I'm going to have a flowing tail, I'm going to have a mane, I'm going to stand fourteen hands high, On the psychozoic plain.' " " He got away with it, too," commented Perry, " but I don't wonder that the Coryphodon couldn't see it coming." "Not only couldn't he see it coming," said his uncle, " but the poet represents him as being quite annoyed about it. ' ' And he continued : " The Coryphodon was horrified, The Dinoceras was shocked, And they chased young Eohippus, But he skipped away and mocked; 256 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS Then they laughed enormous laughter, And they groaned enormous groans, And they bade young Eohippus Go view his father's bones. Said they, 'You always were as small And mean as now we see, And that's conclusive evidence That you're always going to be.' ' What ! Be a great, tall, handsome beast, With hoofs to gallop on? Why, you'd have to change your nature ! ' Said the Loxolophodon. They considered him disposed of And retired with gait serene, That was the way they argued In the early Eocene." " Loxolophodon isn't early Eocene, either," protested Perry. "It's a bully rhyme, Father, but it has got scientific kinks." " How? " " Well, take the line, ' On five toes he scam- pered.' Eohippus didn't have five toes, if I've got it right. I know when I stopped at New York, on the way home from that great trip we had in the Fayum, I spent over an hour in that alcove of the horses in the American Museum, and I'm just as sure as I can be that the Eohippus skeleton they exhibited there had only four toes on the forefeet and three on the hind feet." Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History, FINDING THE EOBASILEUS. Haystack Mountain, in the Bad Lands of Wyoming; the museum explorer is standing at spot where the skeleton was discovered. Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History-. THE EOBASILEUS OB LOXOLOPHODON. A four-horned amblypod (blunt-feet) the largest and last of his race, of which vast herds roamed over the United States three million years ago. MARCH OF THE MASTODONS 257 The scientist looked across the table at his brother. " We're going to make a paleontologist out of this chap after all, I believe, " he said. " Now, Perry, was there any horse earlier than the Eohip- pus? " " There's one awfully like Eohippus that they found in the London Clay," the boy answered. " Let's see if I can remember what he's called? He isn't a ' Hippus ' anything! " There was a moment's silence. " Hyra Hyratherium, " he said at last. " Hyracotherium," the scientist corrected him, shaking his head. 11 That's it. But I could never quite make out, Uncle George, whether he was much different from Eohippus. He didn't have five toes, did he? " " No one knows," was the answer. " Some of these days we may find a complete skeleton of Hyracotherium in that big stretch of clay under London, but, so far, there's only a skull known. Personally, I think he's the same as an Eohippus. Of course there are rudiments of the fourth and fifth toes on the hind feet of that type. But was there ever a true five-toed horse? " " I don't know," 258 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS " It seems to me," said his uncle, " that you'd better come along with me and try to find out. I don't know, either." Perry almost jumped from his chair. " Oh, Uncle George," he said, " you're going off on another expedition! " " Yes." " Where?" " Wyoming." " And am I going? " " That's for your father to say. I'd like to have you along." The lad looked appealingly to the old merchant at the head of the tahle. The latter caught his son's look and smiled. " I think we'll have to let the boy go with you, George," he said, " if it's only to give us a rest. I pledge you my word that there's been so much paleontology talked in this house ever since Perry came back from that Egyptian trip, that half the time, when a bird comes on the table at dinner time, I hardly know whether I'm carving a modern chicken or an Archaeopteryx. " The scientist smiled broadly. " In that case," he said, " you'd better let him come with me." MARCH OF THE MASTODONS 259 "Oh, Father, " cried Perry, " can't I got " The boy's mother began some protest from the other end of the table, but the old merchant paid no heed. " Yes," he answered thoughtfully, " I don't see any reason why you shouldn't go." Perry wriggled in his chair with eagerness. i l Uncle George," he began excitedly, "when are we going to start? And just whereabouts in Wyoming are we going? And what are we go- ing to look for? And " The professor put up his hand in protest. " Easy, easy there, Perry," he said. "I've SL lively remembrance of what you're like when you start asking questions. Spare me now. I'll take a walk with you after dinner and you can spring anything that you want to know, then. " Accordingly, as soon as the meal came to an end and Perry had never thought a dinner could seem so long and slow, he handed his uncle his hat and the big ironwood stick that the professor always carried, grabbed his own cap and half- pushed him out of the door. "Now, Uncle George," he said. "Please, quick, tell me all about it! When are we going to start? " 2 6o THE MONSTER-HUNTERS The professor took out his watch with an as- sumption of intense hurry and consulted it. " The last Eohippus sank quietly to sleep about two and a quarter million years ago," he said, " and somehow I seem to think that he'll stay there and wait for us a little while longer. But of course, if you're in such a tremendous rush " " Please don't joke, Uncle George, I really want to know when we're going to start. I'd like to make those corrections on that Pteranodon that you told me about before I go, any way." " You can probably do that," the scientist re- plied. " I had planned to start for the west in a couple of weeks." " Whereabouts? " " I want to correlate some horizons," was the reply. The boy looked puzzled. " You don't see what I mean! " the professor asked " I don't, quite," the lad replied. " Well, Perry, I want to visit three or four points in Wyoming where different strata of rock are exposed, working from the Upper Eocene downwards. You remember, at the Fayum, there were rocks belonging to the Oligocene Period right MARCH OF THE MASTODONS 261 up at the top of the cliff, Upper Eocene on the next layer, Middle Eocene where we had our camp, and Lower Eocene down near that Birket-el-Qurun lake? " " You bet I remember, " said! Perry, " why, Uncle George, just for fun I made myself a model of it." " Good thing to do, it'll help you to remember. Now, in the States we haven't any one place where all these various strata show up clearly one above the other, with great ledges exposed for explora- tion and working, as they are in the Fayum. But, all over Wyoming, in different valleys and at dif- ferent parts of the Bad Lands, there are these same strata exposed for miles and miles. At one place, Perry, such as the Washakie formation, where I'm going first, all the rocks deposited since the time of the Upper Eocene Period, have been washed or weathered away, so that the Upper Eocene layers are exposed. It's a Bad Land country, too, where the rocks are soft, where there is no fertile soil and no steady rainfall. So, when the cloudbursts come, the rain eats easily into the soft rocks and carries them into buttes and ravines. The sand-bearing winds cut them away still fur- ther, so there are hundreds of thousands of square 262 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS feet exposed to the weather and erosion is always going on." " Gee, what a chance! " cried Perry. " Why, you could go over a country like that every year and find something. " " You can travel over it after every rainstorm or windstorm, for that matter. Then, after I've spent a day or two at the Washakie, I'm going to the Bridger Bad Lands. They've been cut down a little further, so that all the Upper Eocene has been eroded and the Middle Eocene is ex- posed. So you see, Perry, in the Washakie forma- tion we have a chance of finding the fossils of animals that lived in the Upper Eocene Period; and, a few miles away, in the Bridger Bad Lands, we can find the fossils of half a million years earlier. Then, in the Wasatch, there are two places I'm going to visit, the Wind Eiver Val- ley and the Gray Bull Eiver country; the Wind Eiver exposes the top of the Lower Eocene Eocks and the Gray Bull the bottom layers. Then, if I can get time, I'll go to New Mexico, where there has been more erosion and the rocks are cut away down to the Basal Eocene, and, after that, I plan to come back to Wyoming for the famous Laramie formation, which is cut down to the Cretaceous MARCH OF THE MASTODONS 263 Period, or the Age of Chalk, and which has been our great hunting ground for the Dinosaurs. ' ' " My Pteranodon was from the Age of Chalk. " " Certainly, Perry, but it was from a marine formation, earlier than the Laramie. You see the Cretaceous Ocean covered Kansas, but did not cover Wyoming. I want to make an exact map of the relations of these strata to each other so as to show clearly the way in which the rocks were laid down and to give a continuous picture of the life of the animals that lived during those times. You know well, Perry, that I'm always more interested in fossils for the sake of the ideas of primitive life that they give, than for fossils themselves." " Same here," said the boy. " And where are we going to strike first, Uncle George? You said the Washakie formation. Whereabouts, at Hay- stack Mountain? " Again the scientist looked approvingly at his nephew. " You're really doing quite well, Perry," he said. " What made you think of Haystack Moun- tain? " " I've been interested in Eocene deposits ever since that Fayum trip," the boy replied, " and I 264 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS found out that Haystack Mountain was the same age as the beds we worked in Egypt, where I found the Moeritherium. That's sort of made me feel that Eocene fossils were my particular end." " Do you expect to find another Moeritherium in Wyoming? " " No, of course not. The Moeritherium isn't found anywhere except in Africa. You said so." " Are the elephants found anywhere else? " " Oh, sure. They went everywhere." " Why didn't the Moeritherium go every- where? " 11 Because because; oh, I suppose, Africa wasn't connected by land with Europe or Asia. Yes, that's right. Africa was an island in the Eocene Period." " How about Zeuglodons, then? Would you find them in Haystack Mountain? The fact that Africa was an island wouldn't matter to primitive whales. ' ' Perry rubbed his forehead in perplexity. " I've a feeling," he said slowly, " that there aren't any there, but why?" He thought for a moment, then catching sight of a twinkle in his uncle's eye, a sudden thought struck him. " Why, of course not," he said, laughing at himself, MARCH OF THE MASTODONS 265 " that's inland. WeVe got Zeuglodons in the marine Eocene deposits in Florida." " I was wondering, " his uncle said, " if you were going to have whales walking all over the land. I just wanted to remind you that you Ve got to think of the conditions of the deposit as well as the age. One other thing, Perry. If, during the Eocene Period, Africa was an island, do you suppose America was connected with Europe and Asia or not? " " N no," answered Perry doubtfully. " I think probably not. If it was a time when the land was depressed in Africa, it probably was de- pressed here." " Then if Africa had her own types of animals, like the Moeritherium, that we didn't have, you might expect us to have some types that Africa and Europe and Asia didn't have." " Like the giraffe-camels? " " Exactly," the professor agreed, " like the giraffe-camels. But in later deposits, the types mixed. Now, Perry, if you think you really want to come with me, you can either join me in three weeks at the Museum Camp near Haystack Butte, or you can join me a few days earlier and go with me to the Loup Eiver formation in Nebraska. 266 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS It's on the way, and the Museum received a let- ter the other day from a ranchman, who seems to have found a fine specimen of the Columbian mammoth. They want me to go and look it over. I thought you might like to see a mammoth em- bedded. As I understand, this chap has had the sense to leave the skeleton untouched, so it may be in good shape." " I'd awfully like to go there," said the boy, " but I do think I ought to finish up the Pterano- don first, and it'll take me all of two weeks. I'll join you out at Haystack Butte, if I may. I'd like to go with you to see that mammoth, though, 'cause I've never seen one really in the ground. And just what sort of a beast was the Columbian Mammoth, Uncle George! I've never got clearly in my head the differences between a mastodon and a mammoth." "It's a thing you ought to know," his uncle said, " particularly as you found the Moerithe- rium for us. You remember the Paleo-mastodon skull that Antoine found the night before you made your discovery, don't you? ' " Of course !" " And you remember that while the Moerithe- rium skull was found in an Upper Eocene bed, MARCH OF THE MASTODONS 267 the Paleo-mastodon skull was found in a lower Oligoeene." " Of course. " " And you just now told me that Africa was an island during the Eocene period and that it gradually rose, making land bridges across the Mediterranean during the later Oligocene." " Yes," Perry agreed. " Very good. Then, when the land bridges were made, and the mammals from Africa first had the chance to make their way into Europe and Asia and so on to America, the ancestors of the elephants were a little more advanced than Paleo-mastodon. That's clear? " " Quite." " And so you might find the descendants of Paleo-mastodon in Europe in the Miocene Period, after the land bridges were made, but not earlier. ' ' " Yes, I see." ' ' That 's exactly what happened. In the Lower Miocene of Europe is found the Trilophodon or four-tusked Mastodon. The European form is older and less developed than the four-tusked Mas- todon of America, but the little fellow traveled from Africa to China, going through Arabia, and from Africa to Florida by way of the Behring 268 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS Straits land bridges. They weren't straits, then, of course. 11 So, in that warm corner of Africa, the ele- phants slowly began to develop until the time of Paleo-mastodon and later, going on their own way without any interference from others. They man- aged to defend themselves from the creodonts and, little by little, developed trunks and tusks. Then came the land opening into Europe and Asia, and, like a stream bursting through a dam, the four-tusked Mastodons scattered to the four cor- ners of the earth, trumpeting as they went. " They grew more and more powerful. Soon the little four-tusked fellow decided to give all his attention to the development of his upper tusks and to let the lower ones go. One type, which we call the Beaked Mastodon, had a short jaw and his lower tusks turned down. It wasn't a very good arrangement and his kind became extinct. The other two types are distinguished by a differ- ence in the teeth " " Teeth again! " exclaimed Perry. " Exactly. One had four crests on the second molar, the other had three, but it was the three- crested type that had the first success and the three-crested style that led to the modern Mas- MARCH OF THE MASTODONS 269 todon. The first big Tertiary two-tusked Masto- don, who is called Dibelodon, had the three-crested tooth, and he spread everywhere. All the South American Mastodons were of his race. " Meantime, another of the family decided to develop the lower tusks, instead of the upper, and they stuck downwards at right angles to the lower jaw. If you can imagine an exaggerated walrus tusk effect, only coming from the lower jaw, in- stead of from the upper, you can get some idea of it." "What a queer-looking brute! What would be the use of tusks like that? " " For roots," his uncle replied. " It worked fairly well, for the family succeeded for a long time, too. The biggest specimen of Dinotherium, which was found in Eoumania, was bigger than the largest Mastodon. But the Dinothere didn't have the real emigration spirit. So far as we know, he never came to the New World. " At last came the true American Mastodon, developed from the three-crested tooth type. He lived during the Age of Man. Primitive Man hunted the Mastodon and the Mammoth, and has even left pictures of the chase engraved on rein- deer horn. When you stop to consider the crude 270 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS types of stone weapons that Man used at that time, it looks like long odds against the Man. Yet the Mastodons have all gone from the earth and Man remains. ' ' 6 ( There were living Mastodons not so long ago, weren't there, Uncle George? " " Quite recently/' the professor answered, " but the stories you hear about Mastodons hav- ing been seen within historic times are untrue. Still, their skeletons are never deeply buried. They are generally found in bogs and swamps. A great many have been found in New York State and their fossil remains are plentiful all over the Middle West. You know that big swamp about twenty miles south of here? " " You mean Jackson's Bog? " " Yes." " Sure. I've often gone after wild duck, there." " I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were Mastodons in that swamp. I don't mean for shooting purposes," and the professor laughed, " but buried there. Some of these days, if the swamp is drained, possibly many Mastodon skulls and tusks will be found. The animals swarmed all over this part of America. One skeleton, even, Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History. THE AMERICAN MASTODON. The ancestor of the modern elephants ; note the extreme heaviness of body and the sloping head. The mastodon was heavier than the modern elephant, though not as tall. Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History. THE SIBERIAN MAMMOTH. A near relative of the Indian elephant, and like the toaetodo^, temporary of Primitive Man. Note the greB,teT\Kedg>i1< dra -t6 length of limb, the thicker and coarser hair, and the straighter shape of skull; the tusk formation, also, is characteristic, and longer than in modern elephants. MARCH OF THE MASTODONS 271 which was found in New York State, was so well preserved that masses of golden-brown hair were found still attached to the withered skin." The boy looked eagerly to the southward over the countryside. " You'd like to go and start digging in Jack- son's Bog right now, wouldn't you 1 ? " his uncle asked. "Yes," Perry answered with a laugh, "I would. I never thought that there might be a Mas- todon so near home." " You don't have to get far away from home to do fossil hunting," his uncle reminded him. " I remember once I was talking to a group of young fellows in New York, bright working lads, and one of them said to me: " ' Oh, Professor, if only those Wyoming- Texas places you talk about weren't so far away! I'd mighty well like to do something like fossil- hunting on Sunday afternoons and holidays, but there isn't any chance.' " 'Nonsense,' I said to him, ' there are the Pali- sadesj right across the river from your home. You can get there for a nickel and a half an hour's ride. I miss my guess if that isn't a good fossil- hunting ground.' 272 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS " Less than a month after that, Perry, the fa- mous skeleton of a Phytosaurus was taken out of those very rocks." " By one of those chaps? " " By a group of Columbia College boys," was the reply. " They were interested in geology and had gone over there one Saturday to do a little field work ' on their own.' Getting hungry, they sat down on a flat rock to eat lunch, and while lunching, one of them noticed some brownish stain on the rock. Half idly, he said: " ' This looks like a vertebra!' " One of the others laughed, but the third, ex- amining the stains, suggested : " ' It might be bone, at that. Let's take a bit home and find out ! ' " But when they tried to chip it out they found the bone as hard as the rock. Still, they got a small piece and tested it in the laboratory for phosphate, because they knew that if the sample were rich in phosphate it must have come from some living thing. Sure enough, they found phos- phate and decided it was bone. They telephoned to the Museum, and as soon as our men went to the find, we recognized at once that it was part of a skeleton. We chiseled away the rock and MARCH OF THE MASTODONS 273 found what became known as the ' Fort Lee Rep- tile.' " " And it was a Phytosaurus f ' ' the boy asked. " What does a Phytosaur look like? " " There were a lot of different Phytosaurs, Perry, but most of them resembled crocodiles, though more lizard-like than a modern crocodile. The Fort Lee specimen was christened Rutiodon Manhattanensis, and it's the only one of that kind ever found." " Wasn't that great for those college chaps! " exclaimed Perry. 66 Any one, trained or untrained, can find fos- sils," the scientist reminded him. " I tell you, Perry, there's not a corner of the United States from which a fellow couldn't drive to a fossil-bear- ing locality, and not many places where a fellow couldn't reach fossils in a day's walk." 6 i You mean big beasts like the giant reptiles f ' ' " Not only those, of course. No. I'm speak- ing about fossils of all ages. For example, the Fort Lee Eeptile was of the Triassic Period, Perry, so you see he belongs to a long time ago. " In some places, the rock deposits are marine, and one might find fossil fishes. Some rocks were deposited near great forests and one might only 274 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS find fossil leaves and ferns, with, perhaps, primi- tive insects something like dragon-flies, called Meganeura, a foot and a half long. In many places the rocks hold sea creatures from five to fifteen million years old. If every youngster in the United States would look around for fossils when he got the chance, we'd probably find more new species in a year than we find now in ten years. " I wish I had the opportunity that school- teachers have in country schools! There isn't a little red schoolhouse in all the country that couldn't have a splendid local museum, if only the boys would get together." " I'll get a gang together just as soon as I get back," cried Perry. " Do that," said the professor, " tramp the banks of streams and railroad cuttings, every- where that the soil has been cut away. First thing you know, you'll drop on some rare prize that science might never have heard of otherwise." " All right, Uncle George," said the lad, "I'll remember that and I'll see if I can't get a Mas- todon for our little museum out of Jackson's Swamp. How about a Mammoth! Could I get one there, too? " MARCH OF THE MASTODONS 275 "Not so likely, " was the scientist's answer. " The Mammoth only came south with the ice sheet. He was distinctly a winter-loving beast. That's why we have better fossils of the Mam- moth than of any creature. Explorers have found him mummied and almost whole, the entire car- cass frozen stiff and preserved with the hide and flesh. Two complete specimens were found in Si- beria and only a few years ago (1908) one of our museum men secured the larger part of a carcass, with hide and hair, from the edge of the frozen tundra in Alaska." " What's the difference between Mammoths and Mastodons? " " Teeth," was the succinct reply. " The Mas- todons had chopping teeth, the Mammoths had grinding teeth. You can tell them apart at once. The tusks of the Mastodon were more often straight, those of the Mammoth frequently curved inward. ' ' " Which was the bigger? " " The biggest of the Mastodons was heavier than the biggest of the Mammoths, but more stockily built. The Mammoth was taller. The most imposing of them all was the Imperial Mam- moth of North America, thirteen feet six inches 276 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS at the shoulder, with huge incurving tusks. But if it came to fighting, I would place my faith on the American Mastodon. " 66 A scrap between those two would be worth watching," cried Perry, his eyes sparkling. " They wouldn't be likely to meet," said his uncle ; ' ' one lived in the north on the frozen plains, the other preferred warmer climates and forested lands." " Talking of fighting, I was in the Museum the other day," said Perry, " when a terrific thunder- storm came up, and it got almost as dark in there as if it were night. A terrific flash of lightning came, and in the blaze, I had a sudden start, as though one of the skeletons had moved, The crash of thunder that followed seemed like a thou- sand beasts roaring all together. And I had a quick feeling of wonder as to what would happen if all those monsters should suddenly become alive and start ructions with each other." " It would be exciting, certainly," said the pro- fessor. "I'd want my camera," rejoined Perry eagerly. " Would you? " said the professor. " I'd run!" Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History. THE MAMMOTH TUSK HE FOUND. Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History. UNCOVERING A FROZEN Scene on Museum expedition to Alaska, where", Tieaf . a carcass was found, with some skin, masses of hair and wool, and of flesh and fat preserved. Note heavy , mosquito veil worn by excavator. CHAPTER X THE THREE-TOED HORSE " WHICH it's none o' my funeral," said a voice over Antoine 's shoulder, as lie stood on the plat- form of a small station in Wyoming, waiting for Perry's arrival, " an' if you turns me down cold, I won't shoot none, but what in thunder do you want with a buck-eyed, fly-eaten pinto like that? " " To ride him," said Antoine, laconically. The cow-puncher snorted. i ' Eide him ! Why, pard, I Ve seen horned toads that could wiggle their legs a tarnation sight faster, an' any self-respectin' Gila Monster c'd beat him at a beauty show. Which I ain't criticizin' none, you understand, I'm just expressin' my feelin's." Antoine looked quietly at the broncho beside which the cowboy was standing. " I would not enter yours at a beauty show," he retorted. " An' I s'pose you'd be ekally scornful about him in a race? You might like to make a little bet on it? " 277 278 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS " No, no," Antoine replied. " I would not bet against him in a race. He would run too well." * ' What makes you opine he can run ? ' 11 I know he can run," the young paleontologist answered. ' t He must run. A horse with a pelvis placed as high as that, small body well tucked in, and those long, sloping pasterns must be a racer. There is Arabian blood in that horse." The cowboy deftly rolled a cigarette with one hand and eyed the speaker with considerable re- spect. " This is pre-cisely the nine-millionth time IVe acted like a locoed mule," he admitted with can- dor. " I had you all doped out as tenderfoot, an' when it comes to pony talk, you're holdin' a straight flush against my pair o' deuces." " Yes, yes, I am a tenderfoot, as you call it," admitted Antoine, " that is, I have never been in this part of the country before." 11 Then how, in the name of a pea-green, six- toothed rattle-snake, did you get the inside rail on this little bronc' o' mine? ' " That is quite easy," the young paleontologist answered. ' i One of the things that I know is the bones of a horse. You can tell a plow horse from a cow-pony? " THE THREE-TOED HORSE 279 " They don't make any liquor with kick enough in it to make me that blind, ' ' was the reply. " Yet the only difference is that the bones of one are heavier than those of the other," Antoine remarked. " My eye is more trained to small dif- ferences than yours, that is all. You know horses? " " In straight cow-country fashion, I ain't no slouch, " the range-rider declared. "I c'n pick the best pony out of a jammed corral quicker 'n a scared jack-rabbit c'n make three jumps." " How do you tell? " The other thought for a moment. " I jest takes a look at 'em an' knows right off," he answered. " A real cow-pony shapes up right." " But the shape is merely muscle and skin over the bones," the other reminded him. " Suppose the skeletons of half a dozen horses were all mixed up in a heap, you couldn't put them to- gether? " " I pass," was the reply. " Which I've never made what you might call a side-partner of a skele- ton." The paleontologist smiled. " I have," he said. " I have spent many years a8o THE MONSTER-HUNTERS with skeletons as my best friends. It is my ' game,' as you call it." " How's that? " " You round up the cattle that are alive, I round up the animals that are dead, that have heen dead millions of years. I dig them out of the rocks where they are buried." " Oh, I sagatiate! " the cowboy exclaimed, nod- ding his head comprehendingly, " you're a bone- hunter! There's a bunch of 'em out the other side of Blue Goose Gully." " Yes, yes," the young scientist answered, " I'm one of that * bunch.' " " Now I've got your brand," the range-rider declared, with satisfaction. u You don't hold nothin' against me, pard, for not bein' wise? " " No, no, of course not," Antoine retorted, " why should I? " " Havin' made myself look like a tumble-weed for sense," said the other, with an air of self- disgust, " I got to get square. But I opine I c'n break even with you, after all." " How's that? " The cowboy lighted a cigarette from the ashes of his former one, and began: " 'Bout a couple o' weeks ago, when I was THE THREE-TOED HORSE 281 ridin' down a maverick heifer that wanted to take a bite out o' the horizon, I turned the corner of a draw, an' right over my head was the skull o' some kind of critter, skull an' a hoof. Which I ain't superstitious none, but it did look like that ornery critter was walkin' out o' the rock to chase me, same as I was chasin the heifer." Antoine turned eagerly, but the rumble of the incoming train drowned his answer, and, a moment later, Perry jumped out, all enthusiasm and ex- citement. He rushed up to his friend. ' ' You here, Antoine ! Oh, bully ! The profes- sor hadn't told me that you were one of the party! " Antoine replied with equally cordial greetings, for the two had remained good friends ever since the Fayum trip and had corresponded occasionally. Then the young paleontologist, turning to his new- made cowboy acquaintance, said as an introduc- tion : " Meet another * bone-hunter,' won't you? This is Perry Hunt." " Put it there! " said the Westerner, reaching out his hand. " ' Bound -up Dick,' they call me on the range." " Fine," said the boy, shaking hands heartily. 282 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS " I've always wanted to know a real cowboy. You are one, aren't you? " The lad 's interest was so genuine and so thor- oughly boyish that the range-rider smiled broadly. He seldom smiled, but his weather-beaten face brightened marvelously when he did so. " I've punched cattle since I was a shaver seven years old," Eound-up Dick answered, " an' I'm hopin' to wear spurs as long as there's a town- ship o ' range without barbed wire. ' ' " When your train came in, Perry," put in An- toine, eager not to lose the chance of learning more about a possible fossil find, " I was just hearing about a bone outcrop." He turned to the range-rider. " Won't you tell me some more about that? " he asked. " I was remarkin'," the cow-puncher repeated, " that up to the head o' No Wood Draw, as I was eatin' dust to try an' head off a maverick heifer that was headed for China, I run across a critter that looked as if it had been buried in the rock an' was just workin' its way out. It was standin' straight up like as it was alive. I c'd nigh have touched the hoof with my hands as I rode by." THE THREE-TOED HORSE 283 " How big? " the boy queried eagerly. The Westerner looked at the boy's enthusiastic face and repeated his slow smile. " The mere idee gits you all worked up, son, doesn't it!" he said. " You looks like Hard Mouth Bill when he first prospects a faro lay-out after a couple o' months on the range. How big, you asks? 'Bout as big as a yearling.'* " What did it look like? " ' ' Looked same as any bones would. Hold up your cards a minute! " The speaker knitted his brows in perplexity. " Which I'm seemin' to re- member I did see three toes." " Size of a yearling! Three toes! " The lad turned to his comrade in wild excite- ment. " Oh, Antoine," he said, " that must be a Meso- hippus, the three-toed horse! " The cowboy listened in astonishment. " Say them words over slow," put in Eound-up Dick. " Did you remark a three-toed horse a bronc' with three hoofs on each foot? " " Sure," said Perry, " why not? There are horses with four toes, too." " Which I've got a pressin' appointment at another part o' the range," said Kound-up Dick, 284 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS " an' my pardner'll be madder 'n a Greaser cheated out of a cock-fight if I don't adorn the landscape in his vicinity, but I'm tellin' you right now that if there's any chance o' that critter bein' a three-toed horse, I'll point this bronc's head for that spot an' heat up that trail like it was bein' fried. Will you ride? " " Yes, yes," said Antoine. " But, Mr. Bound- up Dick, it may not be a three-toed horse, it may be a rhinoceros." The cowboy looked at him for a moment, first with a puzzled air, and then with disgust. " Now I got the drop on the fact that you're playin' me along," he said sourly, rolling another cigarette. " You c'n call it a nine-legged giraffe, if you like. For a minute there I thought you was playin' with a straight deck." The Belgian looked puzzled at the phrase, but Perry burst out indignantly: " We are playing with a straight deck, Dick," he said. " There was a rhinoceros about the size of a big ram, and it had three toes, like all rhinoc- eroses have, and there were hundreds of them on the plains a million years ago." The cowboy looked at him shrewdly. " You sound some like a Sioux medicine man THE THREE-TOED HORSE 285 after a dose o' fire-water, " he said, " but I've got a trustin' nature, an' maybe I'll play the hand out after all. You're willin' to swear that there was a critter o' that kind? " i " Word of honor," said the boy. " I'm satisfied," the other replied, " I'm always willin' to gamble an' I push in my stack o' chips. If that critter I saw is what you're romancin' about, I'll lay one over on old Doc Gumshoe so heavy that he won't ever have the nerve to talk again. I'll make him look like a paralyzed stingin' lizard. A rhino a million years old! Gents, let us amble forth! " And, putting one toe in the stirrup, Eound-up Dick floated into the saddle, while the broncho be- gan to pirouette on his hind legs. " We'd better follow him while he is in the mood to guide us," said Antoine hurriedly to the boy. " Here's your pony, Perry. I'll tell the station agent to look after your baggage till we get back. ' ' Perry swung into the saddle and loped up be- side the cowboy, whose pony was dancing around while Kound-up Dick sat quite unconcerned. " You're sure a rider, Dick," the lad said ad- miringly. " I wish I could sit a bucking horse like that!" 2 86 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS " This is no buckin V the other answered, " it's jest a little playfulness. No graveyard plug for mine, thanks. Where's your side-partner! " " Coming right now," answered Perry, as An- toine came round the end of the depot at a smart pace. Eound-up Dick gave a whoop, loosed his reins, and the broncho broke into a full run. The other two horses followed, and Perry, wild with delight, found that the queer-looking pinto that Antoine had brought for him was well able to keep up with the others. If anything, it was a trifle faster than his comrade's mount, though the cowboy's mare undoubtedly had the better stride. After a few minutes of the swift pace, the town was out of sight, and Kound-up Dick pulled his pony down to a loping gait. " You said a million years! " he queried. " Three million would be nearer the mark," the lad replied. " You chuck millions o' years around like a sport would chuck dimes to a bunch o' Greaser kiddies," he remarked. " Jest drive a shaft into this thick skull o' mine an' show me how you c'n tell about three-toed horses an' the rest o' the layout." THE THREE-TOED HORSE 287 Perry looked at Antoine, but the young paleon- tologist replied, in answer to the look : " You tell him, Perry, you can make it plainer than I can." The boy pulled his ear meditatively. "All right, Antoine," he said, " I'll do my best." He turned to the range-rider, and began to ex- plain how the rocks were made, either by deposits under the sea, or by the mud carried down by rivers, or at the bottoms of lakes, or by dust car- ried in large quantities by the wind, or by ashes from volcanic eruptions. He showed that differ- ent kinds of animals lived at various ages, and since they all had to die, the skeleton of one kind would be found in one layer of rock, of another, in a different formation. " Look here, Dick," he continued, thinking out some way to make the idea clear, " suppose for a minute that you were a carver, whittling toy animals out of wood. We '11 suppose that the thing you like to carve best is a horse." " Happens that I do whittle," said the cow- boy, "an' you hit the bull's-eye first time what I like best to whittle is ponies." " Good," said Perry, feeling that his illustra- 288 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS tion would carry successfully. " My next ' sup- posing ' won't be as easy." " Shoot! " " Supposing you lived to he a thousand years old." " Don't expect to," said Kound-up Dick; " still, I c'n pipe-dream as good as the next man. All right, I'm goin' to live a thousand years. I'm to be whittlin' steady all the time? " " All the time," said the boy. " I'd be neck-deep in shavin's," said the rider. " Fine," said Perry, " that was just the idea I wanted you to get. Now, we'll suppose that when you started whittling you had a jack-knife, a good one, of course, sharp and all that sort of thing, but still a jack-knife. And we'll suppose that the only kind of wood you could get hold of was pine." " Pine an' a jack-knife," agreed the cowboy. " I've got your trail so far." " You whittled these horses out of pine with a jack-knife for two hundred years straight ahead," suggested Perry, " and any one of them that you didn't think good enough you chucked on the floor, where it soon got buried by the shavings that came showering down. Don't forget, Dick, THE THREE-TOED HORSE 289 you're working like a son of a gun all this time." " Don't I ever get a day off for a bust-up? " queried Dick. " Never/' the boy replied. " Say, pard," the range-rider protested, " don't ride a good horse to death, even in a pipe- dream! " Perry laughed and continued: " After you had whittled straight ahead for two hundred years, you'd have a pile of shavings. The only way that you could handle them would be to stamp them down, every once a while, and, if the roof leaked, the shavings would get wet when it rained and cake down on the floor pretty solidly. Maybe, after a couple of hundred years, you'd get a solid layer of trampled shavings and dust about a foot thick. And scattered through this layer would be all the poor carvings that you hadn't thought worth saving. You get that idea all right? " ' ' Pat hand, ' ' agreed the cowboy. ' ' Go ahead. ' ' " Then at the end of the two hundred years, a chap comes along and looks at your work. He thinks it's fine, but tells you that pine is so soft and the grain is so big that you can't carve the horses as delicately as you'd like. He shows you 290 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS how oak would be a heap better. So you get hold of some oak and start whittling with oak." " For another two hundred years? " " Yes," agreed Perry. " Because the wood is harder and your knife is getting blunt " " Lead me to a knife that'll whittle steady for two hundred years ! Why, Bub, it would have to be a diamond! But I forgot, we were just ' sup- posinV " " An' while you're doing the best you can with that blunt knife," the lad went on, " a fellow comes along and tells you that you'll do a lot better if you use a chisel instead of a jack-knife. So you buy a chisel from this chap, and go ahead with your work. Now the chips from the chisel are going to be a little different from the shav- ings you made with the jack-knife, but they'll be oak shavings still. Then, too, Dick, the oak be- ing so much harder than the pine, you'll only have half as many shavings, so it'll take all of the four hundred years, two hundred with the jack- knife and two hundred with the chisel, to make another trampled-down layer of shavings a foot thick." " I see how you're headin'," said the cowboy, nodding wisely, " an' in the lower six inches o' THE THREE-TOED HORSE 291 that oak stuff will be animals I whittled with the knife, and in the top half, the ones I worked out with the chisel. Is that the idee? " " To a hair!" exclaimed Perry. "By now you're making corking good carvings " " I'd be a looney if I didn't, after six-hundred- years' tryin'," the cowboy interrupted. " And then along comes another man." " Busy trail that," Round-up Dick put in, who was obviously enjoying the tale thoroughly, " that's three men in six hundred years. Not what you'd call crowded! What brilliant idee did this stranger have? ' " Boxwood," answered the boy, " harder than oak. And for the next two hundred years you worked in boxwood." He paused. "An' after that? " queried Eound-up Dick. " Then you take a rest," the boy suggested. " I thought I had somethin' comin'," the range- rider declared, with mock relief in his voice. " Painted Pinto! Wouldn't I make a town hum after eight hundred years without a blow-out! An' what happens after I'm gone? Another man comes, eh? Don't get reckless with your popula- tion, Bub!" 292 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS " Not a stranger this time," Perry went on, " but a cyclone." " Which I'm feelin' grateful you let me get away first." " This is a real cyclone," the boy continued, i ' and we '11 suppose that it tore the shanty in half, cutting it clean across the floor, the way cyclones often do, taking half of it away in a cloud of dust, but leaving half of it as straight cut as though you'd passed a knife through a layer cake." " And I returns to that scene of desolation? ' " You do," Perry assented. " And there you see the half of the shanty and the floor, which is in three layers, the bottom one of pine shavings, the next one of oak, and the top one of boxwood. Then, since you remember how you used to work, you know that there are pine animals carved with a jack-knife in the bottom layer, oak animals carved with a jack-knife in the lower part of the oak layer, oak animals carved with a chisel in the top part of that layer, and boxwood animals in the top boxwood layer." Antoine nodded his head approvingly. 1 ' That is a very good figure, ' ' he said, t ' I think Mr. Eound-up Dick can follow that." Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History. FINDING THE EOHIPPUS The Wasatch formation, in the Bad Lands of Wyoming, in which lie skeletons of the Dawn Horse. Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History. < 7T\Ji . EOHIPPUS, THE FouR-Totfo HORSE. The Dawn Horse, the earliest horse so far kntKvnj sizfetff vlarjje fo: adapted to low-lying and wooded THE THREE-TOED HORSE 293 " Clear as the barrel of a six-shooter a foot from your nose," agreed the cowboy. " Now, Dick," Perry went on, " the real thing was a good deal that way. When Nature first started to make a horse, it came out like a four- toed creature not much bigger than a fox. The rocks that Nature was making at that time, which we call Lower Eocene, we can liken to the pine shavings. So you see, wherever you find Lower Eocene rocks you're likely to find skeletons of that little four-toed horse, just the same way as any place in that layer of pine shavings you'd be apt to find the horses whittled out of pine. We call that horse an Eohippus." " That's a whole lot of handle for a critter no bigger 'n a fox! " " ' Hippus ' means ' horse,' and * eo ' means ' dawn,' " explained the boy, " so the Eohippus is the Dawn Horse, or the Dawn of the Horse." The cowboy rolled a cigarette. " Which I'm admirin' your lay-out a heap," he said, " you've sure got a double cinch-strap on that horse stuff." " I ought to have," said Perry, " it's what I want to work at, though I haven't had much chance in the field yet. Well," he continued, " after a 294 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS few hundred thousand years had gone by, Nature improved on the horse. She found she could make a better horse, if he was a little bigger, and that he could run quicker on three toes than on four. So in the next layer of rocks, which we call Oligo- cene, and which we can liken to the lower layer of the oak shavings, you're apt to find skeletons of that three-toed horse, which is called Mesohip- pus, same as you'd find a knife-whittled oak horse in the lower layer of oak shavings." " And ' Meso-hippus ' means a ' what-horse 9 1 " queried Eound-up Dick, remembering that ' hip- pus ' was a ' horse.' " A middle-horse," the boy answered, " halfway between the dawn horse and the modern horse." " Deal again," said the cowboy. " Another few hundred thousand years went by, a different series of rocks came and Nature again improved on the horse. She saw that he would be better if he were still larger, and swifter if only one toe reached the ground. So in the next layer, which corresponds, Dick, with the top part of the layer of oak shavings, we find a horse called the Protohippus. He had three toes, but only one of them touched the ground, the other two hung useless on either side." Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History. FINDING THE MESOHIPPUS. The Oreodon formation, in South Dakota, with the Museum expedition in the foreground. of American Museum of Natural Hist MESOHIPPUS, THE THREE-TOED^ K The swifter Middle Horse, the size of a coyote, adapted for hard ground ; threateningly watched from a distance by Dinictis, the light-limbed sabre-tooth cat. THE THREE-TOED HORSE 295 The range-rider nodded sagaciously. " An' what's the face value o' ' Proto-hip- pus ' ? " he queried. Perry puzzled for a moment. " The ' Before-Horse/ I suppose; it's really al- most a true horse." " An' the boxwood layer is the ponies o' to- day? " " No, Dick," said the boy. " The next layer, which the geologists would call Pleistocene, has true horses, with a single hoof, and with the other two toes reduced to small splints of bone that don't appear outside the skin. These are called horses. There were vast herds of them roaming over the plains." "An' this little bronc," said Kound-up Dick, slapping his pony's neck, " has come down from them, eh? " " No," answered Perry. " All the American horses went out, bang! "Why, no one knows." " Where did we get the broncs, then? " "From the Spaniards and early colonists of America." The cowboy looked incredulous. " How about the Indian mustang! " " Same thing," asserted Perry. 296 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS " Then what did the Indians ride on before the Spaniards came? " " They didn't ride." The cowboy turned to Antoine for confirmation, and the young paleontologist nodded in support of Perry's assertion. " Yes, yes, he is right, Mr. Eound-up Dick," he answered. " The Indians did not have horses before the white man came. You will remember that even among the Sioux, all their early means of transport was with a dog travois, two poles dragging along the ground. When the Sioux did get horses, they merely made a longer travois." " What killed off all the horses? " "It's a mystery," Perry answered, " no one really knows. We've found fossils of insects like the tse-tse*fly that's the one that causes sleeping- sickness among the cattle in Africa and maybe there was a plague of these flies which started an epidemic that killed off all the wild horses." Perry was about to plunge into a talk over the different reasons why some of the older types of animals became extinct, when suddenly, the cow- boy gave a whoop and spurred his horse to the gallop. As they were riding down a gully, where the ground was very uneven, the boy was only THE THREE-TOED HORSE 297 too glad to pay full attention to his mount. But the cow pony, though going at full speed, picked his way perfectly. In full career, Eound-up Dick swerved round the corner of a cliff and stopped dead. Perry had just time to brace himself against being thrown over his pony's head, when the cowboy, pointing with his finger, said: " Give it a handle! " Perry looked up. There, standing out from the cliff as though it were one of the ancient bulls of Assyria, was part of the skull and the foot of an animal, the hoof pointed downwards as though the creature were going to gallop right out of the cliff. Perry slapped his pony's neck in the exuber- ence of his delight and had a few moments of unexpected war-dance. " Antoine! Antoine! " he cried, clinging to the saddle as best he could, " do you see it? " As the young paleontologist had been looking at the fossil steadily all the time that the lad's pony was prancing around on its hind legs, the question was quite unnecessary, but the boy had to blow off steam. " It is a Mesohippus! " he cried excitedly, " it is, it is, it is! " 298 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS Antoine shook his head.. " It is a Hyrachyus," he said. Then, turning to the cowboy, he continued, " this is the three- toed rhinoceros that I told you about, Mr. Bound- up Dick. And," he added, his eyes kindling, " it may be a perfect specimen. " "A Hyrachyus! " chanted the boy. "G-ee! What a find!" The cowboy shifted impatiently in his saddle. " Let's see the color o' the cards," he said. Antoine shook his feet free of the stirrups, and with an ease that surprised the boy, raised him- self to his feet on the saddle. Standing, the Bel- gian could just see into the jaw of the skull. He examined the teeth carefully, then looked down at the two eager questioners. " It is a Hyrachyus," he said, " an early kind of cursorial rhinoceros. That means, Mr. Bound- up Dick, that he was a rhinoceros with light legs, so that he could gallop like a horse. If you look at the rock, you can see that once it was mud, probably the bank of a small river. From the position of the skeleton of course I can see only the skull and foot the Hyrachyus must have got stuck and was trying to pull his feet out. But THE THREE-TOED HORSE 299 lie was stuck fast then. That was three million years ago and he is stuck fast still." The cowboy looked at Antoine with frank ad- miration. " An' you c'n spot the brand as quick as that ! ' he said. " Which IVe got to admit that you c'n call the turn on me. What happened to those beasts, since there aren't any of 'em on the range? Flies get them, too? " " Sabre-tooth cats got them, I guess," said the boy. " Although the Hyrachyus could run some, with his three toes he probably couldn't get away from the swift sabre-tooths. When you think what a rhinoceros is like, Dick, don't you think it was a plucky stunt for them to get out of the swamps and try to make good on the plains? Plucky, but it didn't go. For all we know, that chap up there may have been the very last of his race, and he not only died with his boots on, but died standing up, at that." " What do you figure on doin' with the bones, now you've got 'em? " " Cut them out," declared Perry. " Eight out o' the rock? " " We'll take rock and all," the boy explained. ' ' That whole block of stone has got to be quarried 300 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS out, even if it weighs a ton. After it has got to the museum workshop in New York, workmen can spend several months carefully chipping away the rock until they get at the bones. It's the hardest kind of work, Dick, and it has to be done by experts. Then, when every littlest bit of the .rock has been chiseled away, the bones have to be mounted. We can make complete skeletons when the remains amount to at least two-thirds of the animal." " Which I don't yet hog-tie the idee how you c'n tell a critter jest by his bones," put in Round- up Dick. " You declares that cayuse in the rock is a rhinoceros the size of a sheep. There isn't nary a hide or a bit o' wool to tell what it looked like. So far as I can see that could ha' been a wolf the size of a sheep or a yearlin' cow the size of a sheep." "It is easy to tell by the teeth," answered Antoine. " Didn't you see me look at the teeth? " " I see you was spottin' something." " Teeth," the young paleontologist answered. " It wouldn't be a wolf, Mr. Eound-up Dick, be- cause a wolf eats flesh and his teeth are made sharp for tearing. A horse or a rhinoceros lives on grasses and plants and he has flat teeth to THE THREE-TOED HORSE 301 grind his food. You can tell almost any kind of animal at once by one tooth, and if you have all the teeth of the lower jaw, you can tell a great deal about the animal. Suppose that I found a jaw, I could tell by the teeth what food that ani- mal lived on. If I knew what food he ate, I could tell whether he lived on the plains, or in a forest or in a swamp. If he lived on the plains, I would know that he must have been able to run fast; if he was in the forest, that he would be heavy; if in the swamp that he must have been able to swim. You see, if I found a jaw alone, I could give you a good idea of the animal." The cowboy stared at him in blank astonish- ment. 1(1 And in this case," Antoine continued, " I can see the feet as well. And the foot tells all about the animal's habits. If I find teeth made to crop grass, and light feet made to run quickly over the grass, I do not have to be very clever to see that such an animal lives on a grassy plain. And if I find that in one part of the world the animal with teeth for eating grass did not develop feet to travel swiftly with, while in another part of the world it did, I do not have to think very hard to see that in the place where the animals did 302 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS not become swift they had no swift-running ene- mies, while in the other place they did. So you see, Mr. Eound-up Dick, where the grass-cropping animals had feet that did not make them swift, I should not look for swift-running enemies, such as the American sabre-tooth tigers." 1 ' It's all so plumb easy when you talk," said the range-rider, " but I'd ha' fought, bled, an' died among a pile o' bones before I'd ever ha' thought it out." " Have you got pretty good teeth, Dick? " Perry asked. " I c'n bite nails," the cowboy answered. " All right," rejoined the boy, opening his mouth and pressing his thumb against his teeth. " Suppose you count them. Begin in the middle. You've got two teeth shaped like chisels, haven't you, and then comes a sharp one, like the long teeth of a dog? And behind they're all fairly flat, eh?" " You call the turn! " " Now, Dick, a dog has three chisel-shaped or incisor teeth, while a cow has three in the lower jaw and none in the upper jaw. Then behind that the dogs have jagged or sharp-cutting teeth, while a cow's teeth are all more smooth. If Antoine THE THREE-TOED HORSE 303 says that's a rhinoceros type, it can't have any sharp-cutting teeth like those of a dog; a rhi- noceros doesn't eat flesh, and so he doesn't need flesh-tearing teeth to tear with. A rhinoceros browses, and so his teeth are grinders to mash the vegetation to a pulp." " That outbids my pile! " the range-rider ex- claimed. " Which I've always been able to hand out a pony's age by lookin' at his teeth, but when it comes to followin' a trail a million years old, why, I can't sit in for that game. But as long as you like to talk I'll keep my ears right up, listenin'!" Antoine looked at his watch. " If we're going to get to Blue Goose Gully," he said, " I think we'll have to start. I've made notes of my bearings." " C'n you find the place again? " queried the cowboy. "Yes, yes, easily," the young paleontologist answered. "It is east-south-east of that peak, north and a half west of that butte, and due east of that rocky spur. I can ride straight to it to- morrow. ' ' " Smooth as a card-sharp with a stacked deck," declared the range-rider. " Which if you're 304 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS ridin' back, gents, that's my trail, too," and with- out further word, he wheeled his pony and started up the gully. " Say, Dick," said Perry, half an hour later, as the station came in sight in the distance, " it was bully of you to come out here and show us that Hyrachyus." The cowboy waved his thanks away with a ges- ture, but the lad continued: " I've been wondering, since youVe got so in- terested in that tooth idea, if you wouldn't like one. If you want to spin a yarn you ought to have something to show! " He put his hand to his tie and drew from it a small scarf pin made from a Zeuglodon tooth ; one of those he had picked up in Zeuglodon Valley two years before. " Here's one," he said, " of a whale that lived about three million years ago. Use it for a stick- pin! " " But, pard " the cowboy began. " Never mind about that, go ahead," urged the boy. " If you don't want to take it any other way, take it just to remember this ride by. Hon- estly, I've got lots of them, and you mightn't happen to see one again." THE THREE-TOED HORSE 305 The lad's new friend protested vigorously, but it was clear that the gift appealed to him, and, just before they reached the station, Perry over- came the last of his objections. The range-rider took the stick-pin and thrust it into the band of his sombrero, taking particular delight in the little patent fastener that Perry also gave him, to prevent the pin from flying out. He flourished the sombrero with a * ' whoop ! ' ' and started his pony on a series of antics that would have done credit to a trick mule. When Antoine and Perry lost sight of him, the broncho was headed across the plains like a dust- whirl, while the cowboy's cheery " Adios! " rang in their ears. CHAPTER XI UNDER THE CLAWS OF A DINOSAUR " IT seems as though my coming had brought good luck," said Perry, joyously, when, all the baggage question settled, he started with Antoine on the trail that led to the camp at Blue Goose Gully. " Yes, yes, it did," answered his friend. " I should not have come into town unless it had been to meet you, and it just happened that Mr. Bound- up Dick was there. We would have been most unlikely to go to No Wood Draw, and if I had not met our cowboy friend that specimen of Hyra- chyus might have been lost to science forever." " I hope I have that same Midas touch every- where! " the lad rejoined, exultantly. " Perhaps yes, perhaps no," the other warned him. " If you find specimens too easily, you will be disappointed when the months go by and you discover nothing. I was very lucky on my second day here, but I have not seen a single good 306 IN A DINOSAUR'S CLAWS 307 specimen for the last two weeks and we are in the heart of the fossil country." " Cheer up, Antoine, you might drop on one any minute! " 1 ' It is that which makes me so eager for every morning, " the young paleontologist replied. " Every day is a new day and is full of promise. And when, each day, I ride out from the camp to a point in the Bad Lands where few people have been, and where no white man has ever walked, picket my horse and start out on foot, all the spell of the explorer comes to me. " All around is the utter silence and stillness. There is no movement of clouds in the deep blue sky, there is no leaf to rustle, no sound of fall- ing water. The sharply carved rocks, pink, red, green and slate-gray, quiver in the sunlight. There is no sign of a life, except perhaps, a lizard darting to his hole from his basking-place on a hot rock, or the black speck of a buzzard in the sky. " It is in a world so new and strange as this that I am searching for a world still more new and still more strange. And then, Perry, when, in the evening, the shadows turn all those glow- ing rocks to a deep purple and I ride home to IN A DINOSAUR'S CLAWS 309 see a shadowy figure such as the Indians would have loved, stride across the sky. " And then, Perry, a brown stain in a rock changes the nature of the dream and the world and the life of three million years ago cpmes surg- ing across my mind instead. It was when I was thus dreaming on my second day here that I found a wonderfully perfect specimen of the very first dog in America, the Procynodictis. That was worth finding." " Dogs as early as the Washakie formation! " exclaimed Perry in surprise. " I thought dogs were as new as bears! " " Not in America," Antoine answered. " The bear is a very late arrival into this country. It is possible that the Cave Man in America was here as early as the Cave Bear, although there were smaller bears in Europe long before. But Pro- cynodictis was almost a direct ancestor of the dog, although, of course, he was a good deal like a cat, too." " A cat and a dog at the same time," exclaimed Perry, laughing; " that's mixing up the breeds, sure enough." " There was a regular cat-dog," the other re- marked, " and cat-dogs, such as Daphaenus, 3 io THE MONSTER-HUNTERS were very plentiful in America during the Oligo- cene Period. They had the teeth and jaws of dogs or wolves, but their claws were like those of a cat and could be drawn out and in, or partly, at least." 11 How big was the one you found, Antoine? " " My Procynodictis was just a little larger than a domestic pussy, but with a smaller body, and longer legs. That combination of dogs' teeth and cats' claws should have been very effec- tive, Perry, but I suppose it was too much of a good thing. Anyway, the cat-dogs died out, when the true cats and the true dogs came on the scene. ' ' " It's queer," said Perry thoughtfully, " how that Eocene Period seems to have been a time of mixtures. ' ' " It was a time of mammal branchings," the young paleontologist reminded him, " the time when the types of to-day began to diverge. What two animals look more unlike each other to-day than a cat and an otter f Yet cat-otters, then, were as plentiful as cat-dogs. They were as big as a Hyrachyus, and considerably heavier. " Patriofelis, who despite his name was not the father of all the cats, since the latter came from a different and smaller branch, must have been a IN A DINOSAUR'S CLAWS 311 very ugly customer, Perry. There was a good deal of the ruth of tooth and claw in those Eocene times, Perry, and an animal that wanted to escape being eaten had to keep a close lookout. And, since keeping a close lookout is a matter of brains, it is easy to see why those animals which had the least brains were the most easily eaten, and so the race became extinct." " Yes," agreed Perry, " that's true yet. If you don't use your brains, the other fellow gets ahead of you." " He doesn't exactly eat you for dinner," said the Belgian, smiling, " but he'll eat your dinner, or eat a dinner at your expense by making you work for him. After all, that's the whole story of development, the quickest, the brainiest animals survived ; the heavy, sluggish ones died off. Look at your friend Hyrachyus, the running rhinoceros. He was just a little heavier than the three-toed horse, so Patriofelis caught and ate him when he couldn't catch the Mesohippus." 1 ' It's like the story of a battle," the boy re- plied musingly. " Here's one small beast that eats grass, and another small beast that eats flesh. The carnivore will eat the herbivore if he can catch him. So the whole family of herbivore has to 3 i2 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS learn to run faster than his enemy. The enemy, accordingly, gets bigger. Or, perhaps, the her- bivore gets arms, and the carnivore has to be more powerful, with sharper teeth and claws. And so it goes on, each developing something against the other, until beast of prey or victim becomes so big or so clumsy that he can't develop any further. Then, since neither can ever go backward over the path of progress, either all the grass-eaters get eaten up and their race becomes extinct, or they learn how to escape from the carnivore and that race dies off because it can't catch its din- ner." Antoine nodded his head. 4 * It is a story of battle," he said, " a battle against other animals or a battle against cold. Look how many beasts have entered into the battle with Man, Perry, and how most of them have lost ! The little wild cow was wise, and, as Kip- ling tells, became Man's Third Friend, and so, to-day, the cow has developed and increased, so that there is hardly a country on the globe where the cow does not live in peace and comfort. But the Buffalo of the Plains gave fight to Man, he put down his horns and shaggy mane and bel- lowed his defiance. And so, Perry, beneath an esy of the American Museum of Natural History. HERD CROSSING RED DEER RIVER, ALBERTA. Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History. MUSEUM BOAT CAMP ON RED DEER RIVER. Canyon where specimens of the gigantic Albertosaurus, Saurolophus, and many other forms of giant reptiles were found. IN A DINOSAUR'S CLAWS 313 inch or so of prairie soil lie the bones of hundreds of thousands of buffalo, and a few half -tame herds alone remain of the vast hordes that roamed the plains and gave food and a livelihood to the In- dians/' " But that's a case all by itself," the boy re- plied. " No," said Antoine, " exactly the same thing happened in Europe. There, the great wild ox, the aurochs the urus that Caesar speaks of a giant bovine six feet high at the shoulder, defied man, certainly until the twelfth century, and prob- ably a few were still alive when Columbus sailed for the New World." " Are there none left now? " " Not one," was the reply; " there are few European bison and a few wild cattle of another species, kept in parks in Europe, but the true aurochs is gone for ever." " I suppose, after a while," said Perry, mourn- fully, " there won't be any wild animal left for us to hunt. When all the open land is turned into farms and all the forests are cleared and handled for lumber, then all the bears and wolves and mountain lions will be shot, and museums, a thou- sand years from now, will be as keen for the THE MONSTER-HUNTERS skeleton of a grizzly bear as we should be to-day for an aurochs." " Undoubtedly, " Antoine answered, " and when Africa is settled, lions and tigers, rhinocer- oses and hippopotami will all go. Man has cre- ated a new age, Perry, the age of usefulness, and the only chance of survival an animal has to-day is to become a slave to Man. In order to do that, an animal has to have a good enough brain to learn. The primitive types are small-brained and will die. " Think, Perry, if a rhinoceros could be taught to carry a load, how valuable he would be in the African jungle! But he fights Man instead, and so he must be killed. If a tiger could be trained to guard a flock of sheep, as a collie is trained, and a collie's ancestors were wolf -like, how safe that flock would be! But the tiger cannot be trained, the whole cat tribe is treacherous. It is the big-brained dog, and the big-brained horse, and the big-brained elephant that become the friends and the servants of Man and thus win a new right to live." " That does seem to make Man the boss." " Man is the boss," the young paleontologist agreed. " He gives the word to live or die, be- IN A DINOSAUR'S CLAWS 315 cause his is the ruling brain of the world. Be- fore Man came, every creature that lived was the slave to Nature, but Man is Nature's master. I think the fossils show that," concluded Antoine, as the tents of the Museum camp hove in sight, " for we see the world of the olden time pre- paring for the coming of Man." " And will Man, too, become extinct and some other animal take his place? " " Some races of men have gone already," the other answered. " The pygmies are dying fast, the last of the giant Patagonians died less than a hundred years ago, the last Tasmanian closed his race in 1876, and the flame of the North Amer- ican Indian is flickering out. The skulls of the men we find in the flint beds of the Ice Age are greatly different from those of any man of to- day. Suppose, Perry, a new Age of Cold should come, all the negroes would die out. If the whole climate of the world grew hotter, so that not even the Temperate Zones were any cooler than the tropics are to-day, the white race would die out and the negro would take its place. In food alone, Man is safe, for he eats both flesh and vege- table food and has brain enough to hunt the one and to cultivate the other." 316 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS Perry waited until Antoine had finished the sen- tence, then, standing on his stirrups, he waved his hat and raised a " Hello!' 7 to his uncle, who was cantering toward the camp from another di- rection. ' * Why, where have you been, you two rovers ? ' queried the professor, cheerily, as they came within speaking distance. " We expected you at lunch time. I even came into camp for lunch to be there when you arrived. " " We met an awfully jolly cowboy and he took us to a Hyrachyus, Uncle George ! ' ' the boy burst out. " Oh, it's a peach, standing up there in a rock just as if it were going to gallop out! ' Antoine was just as excited as the lad, and just as eager to tell the story, but his manner was less exuberant. "I think it really is a good specimen, Dr. Hunt," he said, " but I'm afraid it will be quite difficult to remove." " You think the skeleton is complete? " " Of course," the Belgian answered, "it's im- possible to say until the matrix is removed, but I think, from the position of the bones, that the Hyrachyus was mired, and so the complete skele- ton is likely to be in place." IN A DINOSAUR'S CLAWS 317 " Your discovery is almost an exact duplicate of the manner in which, the first known Hyrachyus was found," the scientist remarked, " the famous specimen discovered by Cope. Evidently Hyra- chyus seems to have had poor judgment in tell- ing when a place was safe or not. A really good Hyrachyus! Yes, that's worth while. What was the condition of the skull, Antoine? " The younger paleontologist immediately plunged into an exact description, while Perry marveled at the amount of detailed information his friend had secured during the few moments, when, stand- ing on the saddle, he had made a brief examination of the skull. As the party cantered into the camp, the pro- fessor turned to his nephew and said : " This find gives you a chance I hadn't ex- pected, Perry. I thought that we would leave here to-morrow, but, of course, you can't imagine my leaving a specimen like that without looking it over! I'll run over to-morrow with Mr. Gain- man, the leader of this expedition, and you '11 have a chance to do a little riding around yourself, and get the general characteristics of this Washakie formation in your head." That evening after dinner, under prompting 3 i8 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS from Perry, Dr. Hunt told of his adventures in Tierra del Fuego and in the interior of Patagonia in a search for a living specimen of the giant ground-sloth, the great Megatherium, a monster twelve feet in height. " ' ' Did you think that there were any giant sloths living still, Uncle George? " the boy asked. " I hardly thought so," the scientist replied, " but I hadn't sufficient reason to disbelieve the report. All through South America there are le- gends of the great ground-sloth having been do- mesticated by Man. And, as you probably know, every once in a little while, there are fantastic stories of Mylodon, twelve feet in length, having been domesticated like cows by Primitive Man." " You mean that Primitive Man milked the sloth? " exclaimed Perry in amazement. " So the story runs. But I don't think it can be regarded as true. In the first place, the Pa- tagonians were not very far advanced in civiliza- tion; and in the second place, the sloths are no- toriously slow in brain, so that they would not be teachable. Of course, one could say that the stupidity of the sloth made them fit for domes- tication, because they wouldn't know enough to resent slavery." IN A DINOSAUR'S CLAWS 319 " Then I should think they would have been preserved instead of dying out." " Very well reasoned, Perry,'' said his uncle, nodding his head approvingly. " That is a most important point. If the sloth could have been domesticated like the cow, the Patagonians would have had a better chance of survival, and if the Patagonians could have raised sloths, the sloths would have survived in herds also. No, Perry, I think the South American natives must have been more anxious to kill and eat the sloths than to domesticate them, though it is almost as strange to understand how a few scattered natives, with stone-tipped spears, could have caused the ex- tinction of a race of giant animals that had sur- vived all the changes of several million years. For you remember, Perry, that the ancestors of the ground-sloths, such as Prepotherium, date back as far as the Miocene Period." ' ' But is there any record of those huge ground- sloths having been found in South America ex- cept as fossils? " queried Perry. " No," the professor replied, " there is not. But that is not a sufficient reason for saying that there never is going to be. Don't forget the okapi! And the reason that I joined that ex- 320 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS pedition to Patagonia, Perry, was because one of the universities received what seemed like sure and accurate information about a still living ground-sloth. The matter was worth investigat- ing. It might be true." " Then you think it is possible, still? " * Quite possible, but unlikely. It is equally pos- sible that there may still be a small herd of mam- moth in the unexplored region west of Hudson's Bay, but the reports that are brought in by travelers that they have seen a living mammoth, have never been verified. " Many scientists believe that there still be a few giant Moas in some of the interior regions of New Zealand, but the most diligent search has failed to find any." " Moas were like ostriches, only bigger, weren't they, Uncle George? " " A very great deal bigger, and much heavier in build. Yet, less than ten years ago, a mission- ary reported that he had knowledge of a feast at which the Maoris, or New Zealand natives, had found, killed, and eaten a giant Moa. There's no doubt that the Maoris used to eat the Moa, as recently as a century or two ago. Their remains have been discovered in the charred remains of IN A DINOSAUR'S CLAWS 321 camp fires. Their bones are found in thousands, lying on the surface of the ground, hardly buried at all, showing how recently they became extinct. " In one morass, abounding in warm springs, the bones of the Moa were found in enormous num- bers, layer upon layer. They are there in thou- sands, and the only reason for that vast horde of skeletons is, that in some terribly cold winter, or, it may be, in one of the later cycles of the Ice Age, the giant birds made their way to the warm flowing springs in the hope that their feet, at least, might be safe from the biting frost, and, undoubt- edly, the warm springs made the air less bitterly cold. But there was no food there, and they per- ished miserably from cold and want. That may have been a long time ago. Yet, Perry, only a few years ago, a Moa egg was found in a Maori grave, tightly clasped in the bony fingers of a skeleton. None the less, that doesn't prove that it was a new-laid egg! " " It certainly wasn't when it was found, if it was in a grave," ejaculated Perry. " Exactly. Finding an egg is no proof of its age. For example, a perfect egg of the Aepyornis the biggest egg in the world, six times as large as an ostrich egg was found after a hurricane, 322 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS bobbing serenely up and down on the waves near St. Augustine's Bay." " How in the world do you suppose it got there? " " Probably it had been buried in a swamp," the professor replied, " and, it may be, when the hurricane uprooted a tree, the outbursting roots tore up some of the soil and exposed an egg which had been buried in the swamp muck. The egg floated to the surface and so made its way down to the sea." " You said the Aepyornis egg was six times as big as the ostrich's egg, but the bird wasn't six times as big, was it! " " Hardly," said the scientist, smiling; " that would be like the Eoc, that Sindbad the Sailor spoke about. But I think that the huge eggs of the Aepyornis were the things that started the story about the Eoc. You know, it was supposed to have its home in Madagascar. There are sev- eral of those eggs known, and 'one very fine one is in America. As a matter of fact, the bird was not very much bigger than an ostrich. When you come to feathered giants, Perry, Patagonia must take the lead, and when I was down there this last winter, I found some splendid specimens. ' ' American Museum of Natural History. OPENING (REAR TENT) TO MOROPUS QUARRY. irtesy of American Museum of Natur INSIDE THE MOROPUS Museum expert uncovering bones of a Chalicothere, a strange creature with the teeth of a rhinoceros and clawed feet, twisted like those of an ant-eater. IN A DINOSAUR'S CLAWS 323 " Oh, Uncle George, how big? " " Well, I found a Brontornis, or Thunder Bird, with leg bones bigger than those of an ox, stand- ing about eleven feet high. The drumstick was thirty inches long ! That would be a bird to serve whole for a Christmas Dinner instead of a four- teen-pound turkey! " Perry looked thoughtful. 11 IVe got a pretty good appetite, " he said, " but I think a drumstick nearly a yard long would satisfy me ! ' ' 66 Even that wasn't the strangest of my finds in Patagonia along the bird line," his uncle con- tinued. " Together with one of the university men I found a fairly good specimen of that queer- est of fierce birds, the Phororhacus. Imagine, Perry, a bird seven feet high, with a head as big as that of a horse, and a beak ten times as big and powerful as that of an eagle. Conceive of that head and beak poised on a heavy and densely mus- cled neck that could strike like a thunderbolt, and I think you would agree that a blow from that ornithological pick-ax would be a good thing to dodge! In addition, you must present to your- self the idea of legs something like those of an ostrich, but more powerful and heavier, and those 324 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS bore sharp tearing claws. Decidedly the Phor- orachus was a bird to let strictly alone. It is hard to understand why a creature so well equipped with beak and claw perished from the earth, leav- ing no descendant to carry on the race." " None of those giant birds flew, did they, Uncle George? " " No/' was the reply, " they were all too big for flight. About twenty feet span of wing or fifty to sixty pounds in weight seems to be Na- ture's limit to the size of anything that flies." " That's the size of the Pteranodon." " Exactly," the professor answered, " and he was the largest of the flying reptiles. Now a bird as heavy as Phororhacus or the elephant-footed Moa would have needed a sixty-foot spread of wing. The giant birds were all flightless and they all flourished in islands and isolated places where they had few enemies. Thus, Perry, the ostriches come from Australia, the Moas from New Zealand, the Aepyornis from Madagascar and the Phoro- rhacus from Tierra del Fuego and from South America in the period when it was isolated from the North American continent. Now in Tasma- nia, which is close to Australia, it happened that two carnivorous animals developed, the Tasma- IN A DINOSAUR'S CLAWS 325 nian Wolf and the Tasmanian Devil. As a result, in Tasmania there are no flightless birds. When carnivores are around, the only place of safety for a bird is in the air, and since there is a limit to flight, all the successful breeds of birds are small. " At this point Dr. Gainman, the head of the camp they were visiting and with which Antoine was working, joined the party and the conversation passed into a scientific discussion concerning the effect of geographic isolation on the development of birds, and, long before the subject had been set- tled, Perry had made his way to his own tent and was fast asleep. Next morning, while Dr. Hunt and Dr. Gainman rode over to No Wood Draw, with Antoine as guide, to view the skeleton of the Hyrachyus and discuss the best means of removing it and ship- ing the block to New York, Perry started out alone for Haystack Butte. His ride with Bound- up Dick and Antoine had given him a good idea of the country, and, on the way from the station to Blue Goose Gully, Antoine had pointed out to him its geology. Still he was surprised, when, less than an hour after leaving camp, he found him- self on a well-beaten trail. Half feeling that the 326 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS trail might lead in his direction, since it passed close to Haystack Butte, he followed it for a little distance. The skeleton of a horse, half buried in the soil, and, a quarter of a mile further on, the skull of an ox, made him wonder. Then, sud- denly, the lad remembered a diagram in one of his old scientific books at home, showing a sec- tion of Haystack Mountain and the surrounding country, and on the diagram a winding road with the old thrilling name : " The Overland Trail! " Unconsciously, Perry checked his pony and looked to the westward. " The Overland Trail! " Over that trail how many emigrant trains had passed! On the long prairie stretches how many bands of hostile Indians had been fought ; over the Bad Lands in which he was riding, how many emi- grants had died, the men gaunt and footsore, the women weak and starved. " The Overland Trail! " No three words in all the language tell a grimmer story of American History, no three words hold more gallantry or more adventure. It was with a jerk that Perry pulled himself back to reality again and turned to the left from the old trail, towards the low slopes of that butte which is dignified by the name of Haystack Moun- IN A DINOSAUR'S CLAWS 327 tain. It took a sharp eye to distinguish between the two levels of rock, of which the distinguish- ing characters had been explained to Perry by Antoine, but the boy read his way correctly. Bounding one of the small erosion buttes he reached the point where one of the parties from the camp was engaged in uncovering a Eobasileus or Loxolophodon skeleton that had been dis- covered a week or two before. Perry called to remembrance the rhyme his uncle had told him quoting the scornful remarks of the Loxolophodon to the aspiring Eohippus, and he smiled. He tethered his pony, and boy-like, clambered to the very top of Haystack Butte, beneath the cap of which the Eobasileus skeleton had been found. He spent the day happily roam- ing around the country, learning the lie of the rocks from the clues that had been given him by Antoine. Next day, with his uncle, the boy started north for the Grey Bull River country to review the Lower Eocene Beds. Perry thought he knew his geology fairly well, but he had not the slightest idea that there could be as much excitement in a mere ride through that country with some one who was as expert as the professor. The finding 328 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS of each new rock was like the finding of a new wild animal, and Perry aptly described the ride as ' ' gunning for strata ! ' The trip through the Puerco and Torrejon re- gions of New Mexico was also a delight to the boy, but as their researches took them further and further down the rock levels and they grew nearer and nearer to the level where the giant reptiles could be found, all the great wonder re- vived, and at night, in his tent, Perry dreamed again and again that he was on the back of the unicorn, speeding through that Jurassic world of giant dinosaurs. At last, the New Mexico strata sufficiently studied, the two took the train back for Wyoming once more. They picked up their ponies at the nearest station to the reptile beds and a little later stopped at an abandoned sod cabin that had been used by the Museum expedi- tion several years before when taking out speci- mens from the Bone Cabin quarry. " There, Perry," said the professor, pointing to the ruins of a small building on a hillock at the end of the valley not far from the sod cabin, " is the most marvelous fossil spot in the world. It is famous to every scientist and will be famous forever." IN A DINOSAUR'S CLAWS 329 " Why, Uncle George? " " That is Bone Cabin Hill, right at the end of that ' draw/ :> was the reply, " and it is the site of the greatest find of dinosaurs made in a single locality in any part of the world. One of our own Museum men made the discovery, in the spring of 1897. " We had been steadily working down all the beds that hold the fossils of mammals, the beds that you and I have seen, Perry, and in the spring of 1897, the Museum decided to undertake the ex- ploration of the rocks that lay below them, rocks of the Cretaceous and Jurassic Periods. We were especially anxious to explore the rocks of the upper Jurassic, which showed the first dawn of the Mammal Age and so we made our way here, to the Laramie Plains, but over towards the base of the famous Como Bluffs. " Marsh and Cope, the great pioneers of all American fossil work, had explored these bluffs thoroughly, so that we were not very sanguine of success." " Still, Uncle George," the boy suggested, " weathering is always going on." " Of course," the professor answered, " that was what we counted on. When we reached the 330 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS bluffs, we found numbers of bones of giant reptiles strewn along the base, tumbled from the rocks above, as gradual weathering had exposed them, but most of these were broken and so badly weath- ered that other collectors had passed them by. The outlook was not good, but after a few weeks we found parts of the skeleton of the Diplodocus and the Brontosaurus. ' ' " Let's see," said Perry thoughtfully, " the Diplodocus was the long-limbed one and the Bron- tosaurus was a heavy brute." " Fairly heavy," agreed the professor, " the one we found would have weighed at least thirty- eight tons when alive. The skeleton was sixty-six, nearly sixty-seven feet long. One of our men discovered it and it took the whole of one sum- mer to extract the skeleton from the rock, here, on the Laramie Plains, and ship it to the Museum. In the New York workshops it took another two years of steady work, all day long, every day, to chip away the rock from the bones, to cement the brittle and shattered petrified bone, so that it would be strong enough to bear handling, and to restore the missing parts of each of the broken bones. And then, Perry, the mounting of the skeleton had not been begun." IN A DINOSAUR'S CLAWS 331 " I can see how that would be," the boy ex- claimed, " I didn't cut my Pteranodon entirely away from the rock, and just to get it partly cleared away was an awful job." " Mounting that big skeleton was unbelievably hard," the professor continued. " No museum had ever before attempted to mount so large a fossil skeleton, and you see, Perry, the bones were so fragile that they could not even bear their own weight, much less the weight of the skeleton. Nearly every separate bone had to be specially treated and hardened so as to be rigid. Then came the question as to the way in which the bones were to be articulated together. No one had ever seen a living Brontosaurus, of course, and so there was no guide as to what he looked like. The bones were there, but bones aren't a safe guide by them- selves." " I don't see why not," remarked Perry. 11 Suppose you found the bones of a frog, but no one had ever seen a frog or anything that looked like one! You might set the animal up with those long doubled-up legs quite straight, so that he would look as though he were on stilts." " That would sure make a queer-looking beast," said Perry, laughing. 332 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS " Exactly. So, in order to get an idea of the way the bones must have been during life, we dis- sected and studied nearly every living reptile, es- pecially the alligators and the lizards, and worked out the muscles of almost all of them. Then the corresponding bones in the Brontosaurus were compared, and the position and size' of the muscles worked out, as far as they could be judged from the notches and grooves still preserved on the bones. ' ' " My word, that's real work! " " You can be sure it was real work/' the pro- fessor assured him. " Then, Perry, we articu- lated the skeleton loosely, and the position and size of each muscle were judged from strips of paper we pasted on the bones to represent the muscles. As we moved the joints, we watched the paper move, and compared the movement of the paper with the muscles of the living reptiles. When we got the limbs into the proper places, the whole question of the weight and pose of the body, as it must have been in life, was worked out, and finally the skeleton was mounted in what must have been the characteristic position that the Brontosaurus assumed during life. That took us another three years. It was not until three years ! IN A DINOSAUR'S CLAWS 333 later, or six years altogether, tliat the Brontosau- rus skeleton was finally mounted/' 11 Meantime, Uncle George, I suppose you had found the Bone Cabin quarry," said the boy, anxious to bring his uncle back to the story of the discovery. " We first found that quarry in the autumn of the year we began work on the Como Bluffs/' the professor replied. " One of our fellows was doing a little prospecting over the plains, as we felt we had exhausted the Como Bluffs specimens that had been exposed so far. Now, if you re- member, Perry, as we rode out here this after- noon, we sighted the Laramie Mountains and the Freeze Out Hills and I pointed out to you that they were quite recent in origin. As those ranges were uplifted, they crushed together the surface of the level plains and crumpled them into rock waves. Erosion cut away the tops of those waves and exposed the rock at the edges, though, of course, the lower parts of these rock waves are still underground and it will take the erosion of many centuries to expose them. The bone-hun- ters of the future will find more treasures waiting for them on the Laramie Plains, just as we have done. 334 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS " You remember, Perry, I showed you the ir- regularities of the bone layer. At the place where you started up that prong-horn antelope to-day, the bone layer was level, and that little gully where you retrieved that sage chicken you shot, just before dinner, was the trough of one of those rock waves. The Laramie Plains are like a huge graveyard of the giant saurians which has been crumpled like a sheet of paper. So, when we had almost finished with the Como Bluffs, we decided to prospect across the plains, watching carefully for each place that might be the top of one of these waves, and therefore might be an exposure of the fossil-bearing fresh-water rock. " As the second in command of our party was riding over the plains, keeping a sharp lookout for the characteristic lie of the land, he noticed a little hillock. Not being a part of the usual wave formation, it did not strike him forcibly, but, in riding past, he noticed a number of brownish masses that looked like sandstone concretions. Brown sandstone is not plentiful in that region, so he looked a little more closely. " Suddenly he pulled up with a jerk. There, at least, was something that was not sandstone! A less experienced eye would have passed the IN A DINOSAUR'S CLAWS 335 boulder by, but the Museum expert was too keen a man not to have quick perception. Another, and another and yet another ! He hopped off his pony, dropped the reins, and came to the hillock. " The entire mound was made of dinosaur bones ! * ' All the dark-brown boulders were the remains of ponderous fossils which had slowly washed out from a great dinosaur bed beneath. The bones had been so thickly strewn that they had held the soil together against erosion. The explorer climbed the little hillock, and there, near the top, was the abandoned dugout foundation of a shanty that some Mexican herder had built there many a year ago. It was a shallow cellar, only a few feet deep. " The foundation was lined with a wall of fos- sil bones! These huge petrified blocks which the herder had only thought of as stones and used as a base for his shanty, were treasures that are now of incalculable value to the scientific world. To the trained eye, this hillock was like a sign-post slowly erected by Nature during millions of years to point the way to the great cemetery below where the most gigantic of her children lay buried. " It was in the late spring of next year that I 336 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS came on the scene. The hillock was a mass of glowing color. Wild flowers were blooming every- where. The cacti were in full blossom, and the dwarf bushes of the desert were in the few weeks of their greenness. Half -hidden amid the flowers and the cacti were these brown boulders which had been found to be bones. " All the three great kinds of dinosaurs were there, Perry. The bones of the huge Bron- tosaurus and Camarasaurus lay beneath that hil- lock of the great army of Amphibious Dinosaurs, those monsters with blunt pointed teeth and blunt claw, with limbs and feet like elephants, un- armored five toed, with long neck and small head ; only the most tremendous of them, the Brachio- saurus, was missing. These Amphibious Dino- saurs were the largest creatures that ever trod the world, Perry, and their bulk was too great for them to have lived any other than a marsh life, when the buoyancy of the water in part sustained the weight of their enormous bodies. " The Beaked Dinosaurs were in that Bone Cabin hillock and in the beds below by dozens. There were two or three species of the Campto- saurus, one quite small, only three or four feet high, another six or seven feet high, but both of IN A DINOSAUR'S CLAWS 337 them much smaller than their gigantic relative, the Iguanodon, which lived about the same time in Western Europe. There were those super-dread- noughts of the dinosaur world, the short-legged Stegosaurs, built for impregnable defense, with feet like elephants, short neck, small head, and a body and tail armored with massive bony plates and large spines. ' ' " Ah," said Perry, remembering his dream, " it was a Stegosaur that saved me! " His uncle stared at him, not in the least under- standing the remark, but continued: "Then, too, there were carnivorous dinosaurs of two kinds, one a small agile beast, Ornitholestes, some six feet in length, and the other the terrible Allosaurus, a giant flesh eater, thirty-eight feet long, with bird-like feet and huge jaws armed with pointed teeth sharp as a knife and great curved talons. Not only did we find the skulls and skele- tons of these beasts, but also significant evidence of their habits. The bones of the herbivorous dinosaurs, even of the Brontosaurus, were not un- commonly scored with the tooth-marks of the Al- losaurus, whose broken-off teeth sometimes lay beside them in the quarry. So you see that among these Jurassic Dinosaurs there was the same divi- 338 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS sion into hunters and prey that one sees every- where in Nature. There, as everywhere else, the hunters developed weapons for attack teeth and claws; while the hunted animals either developed some kind of armor or weapons of defense ; others, again, developed means of speed for flight from their foes, or retreated to some inaccessible place for safety. The carnivora, in turn, were trying out improvements in method of capturing and at- tacking their prey." " Same old fight! " exclaimed the boy. " You can see the fight even more impressively in the Cretaceous Period, some millions of years later than the Bone Cabin dinosaurs. By that time the huge but clumsy and helpless amphibious dinosaurs had become extinct. The unarmored Camptosaurus, Iguanodonts and their relatives had taken to the water as swimmers rather than waders, and had become the Duck-billed dinosaurs, with rows of small teeth behind a duck-like bill, web feet and a powerful swimming tail. " The armored dinosaurs had developed stronger armor, while another group had devised a novel and most extraordinary protection, a huge buckler over the head and tremendous horns over the eyes and on top of the nose. There were the IN A DINOSAUR'S CLAWS 339 Horned Dinosaurs, with their huge heads. One of these, Triceratops, he of the three-horned face, had a neck with an enormous bony frill like the spiked collar that some bulldogs wear, as well as his threatening horns. He was a powerful beast, Perry, this Triceratops, and must have been able to hold his own against the terrible carnivorous dinosaurs that threatened every moment of their lives. " " Were they as big? " " Yes, bigger and far more menacing. Tyran- nosaurus, the Tyrant Saurian, was perhaps the fiercest creature that ever drew breath upon the earth. He reached a length of forty-seven feet and stood twenty feet high, standing upon his huge hind legs. His head was more than four feet long and his deep jaws bore a grim array of tearing six-inch teeth. The hind legs, though larger than those of elephants, had feet like those of birds, with sharp ripping claws, and the fore- feet were clawed like the talons of an eagle." * ' Not much chance if a thing like that got after you," the boy ejaculated. 11 It would be a mistake, though, Perry," his uncle warned him, " to imagine even the Tyran- nosaurus as swift or active. An animal larger 340 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS than an elephant, with a tiny reptile brain, smal- ler than a man's clenched fist, could never have leapt or sprung upon a foe, but must have ad- vanced with a heavy lumbering run. There came the value, my boy, of the great massive defense of Triceratops, the three-horned, for while that heavy head with the neck collar of plates would have been of little value against a small, swift enemy, it might easily impale the ponderous Ty- rannosaurus as he ran fiercely though clumsily onward to the fight. They were slow and deadly fighters, Perry, those giant reptiles of old, and probably, every meeting meant the death of one or both, and was ended with the first or second grapple. " " I wish we could see one of those fights be- tween two scrappy monster Saurians, anyway/' the boy said wistfully. " That is past wishing for," the scientist re- plied, " all we can hope for is to study the way they must have fought. Perhaps, Perry, if we should find some specimens of the great carni- vorous dinosaurs, the Museum may be able to mount them in the attitude of fighting, and thus, ten million years after their death, they will thrill the world of men, when, during all their lifetime, IN A DINOSAUR'S CLAWS 341 they had no audience to applaud nor any specta- tors to terrorize." The following day, and for many days there- after, Perry prospected with his uncle through- out the Laramie Plains. He stood in the old Bone Cabin Quarry, he saw the thousands of bones that still lie at the base of the Como Bluffs, he followed eagerly and anxiously the various rock waves of the plains. Many and many a fossil he found. Indeed, there was hardly a day that he did not return to camp with news of some discovery, but always the professor found that it was a common specimen, or one of which there were more com- plete skeletons known. Yet, as Antoine reminded him, each day held new promise. On the very last day but one of the time allotted for their stay, Perry decided to ride out in a dif- ferent direction. His uncle had said that some time in the future he intended to do some pros- pecting near the Freeze Out Hills, and Perry, re- membering that the Bone Cabin quarry had been found almost by accident, started out early that morning for the longest ride he had undertaken by himself. The day was hot and sultry, but the lad had a curious elation. " I feel it in my bones that I'm going to find 342 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS something to-day! " he had said to his uncle be- fore leaving. Noon came before he had reached the desired point, but the rock formations began to look fa- miliar, more like those in which he had been work- ing for the past three weeks, and so, though he was far from camp, Perry went riding onward still, knowing he would be late in returning, but buoyed up by the feeling that the fates had some- thing good in store. His senses were keenly awake, the green and pink striped rocks seemed to beckon him on. He felt as though the impossible might happen, as though one of the great dinosaurs might stride out, as in life, from behind some of the fantasti- cally carved buttes on either hand. A jack rabbit, suddenly leaping along a dry ravine, brought his heart in his mouth with a jump. A stumble of his cow-pony changed the current of his thoughts and made him realize that he had not stopped for dinner, nor given his pony any water since break- fast. Dismounting on the instant, he slung out the canteen, and, finding a slightly hollowed rock in a shadowed place where it had not been turned to blister-heat by the sun, gave his pony a drink IN A DINOSAUR'S CLAWS 343 and a handful of oats. He took out his own sand- wiches and idly tossed a crumb to a lizard bask- ing on a rock hard by. The little brown creature snatched the crumb, and with a flicker of his tail, disappeared. Idly, his lunch over, Perry followed where the lizard had gone and stooped down to look into the hole. " If a chap could only multiply that lizard by about a hundred times, " he said to himself, " it wouldn't be so awfully far from a Diplodocus. A hundred times as long " He stopped. " A hundred times " What was that queer exposure in the rock? He rubbed his eyes. Kemembering that An- toine had warned him of the strange appearances that seemed to come in the glare of those painted rocks, he turned away and looked into the shadow. Then, hardly daring to trust his eyes, he walked over quietly and softly to a long, low mound, from three inches to a foot above the surface, which ran along the edge of a small gully. A long broken line of weathered bone met his gaze. Feverishly, hardly daring yet to believe that it might be true, he fell on his knees beside the 344 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS bones, and with his small geological pick, began to clear away the rock, half hopefully, half fear- fully seeking to make sure. The rock was fairly soft. Soon, at the end nearest to him, one of the larger bones showed clear, as the sun and weather had cracked the rock around it. Chip, chip, chip! The minutes and the hours passed, but the boy, down beside the brown bones on the ground, knew nothing of the time. Forty feet away, the pony plucked at the scanty herbage, but Perry never took his eyes off from the ground. The rock was not hard, and was sufficiently rotted to break under the pick, and by fractions of an inch the bones grew clearer. Chip! Chip! Chip! Over the mountains to the westward the sun began to fall, the shimmering heat of the desert cleared and the distant buttes glowed purple. But, though the boy's arm was aching and his back was stiff from long stooping, he was as un- witting of the pain as of the waning light, and the blows of the little hammer came down with ceaseless regularity, telling the strokes of doom t,hat should bring some monstrous creature from its ten-million-year-old grave. IN A DINOSAUR'S CLAWS 345 Chip! Chip! Chip! The rim of the sun had touched the further hills, when, still in a daze, the boy straightened up and looked at what he had uncovered. Small though was the head, fragmentary as was the amount of rock he had removed, he added hope and imagination to knowledge and envisioned the whole. The monstrous length of neck which he felt sure must be the meaning of those slight out- crops hinted a colossal story. He paced the whole line of the skeleton. One ! Two ! Three ! Thirty-four paces ! One hundred and two feet ! It could not be ! But, returning his steps, the paces came to the same. Perry looked at the sky and knew that it was evening. Carefully he had watched his land- marks as he rode, but too many people had told him of the dangers of being lost in the Bad Lands for him to dare to try to make his way home. Still, he might make a start. Back to his pony went the boy, and, before mounting, he looked round once again to see the great mushroom-capped butte that was his home- ward guide. He could see it nowhere! And, while he watched, he saw shapes that had been 346 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS quite familiar in the daylight change under the quickly fading dusk. There was no help for it, he must stay the night through and wait until the morning to find his way back to camp. But the giant skeleton lured him again, and, a few moments later, he was on his knees again be- side that ancient saurian, and the strokes of the hammer fell throbbing across the silence of a night in the Bad Lands. Chip! Chip! Chip! Far away in the distance, where perhaps some slight vegetation came down from the hills, for he was on the very edge of the desert country, came the long-drawn howl of a coyote. For a second the hammer hung poised, then fell again, beating, beating through the night. He knew that to expose such a skeleton would mean the work of a month or two for several men, probably with the aid of dynamite, but he was de- termined at least to bring an inch or two, clear. The chill star-shine gave him light enough, but though the day had been so hot, the night was cold. He piled a heap of sage-brush and mesquite and lit a fire. Then, unable to leave his find, back he went to the skeleton again. Chip! Chip! Chip! jil I Ufa 3 * .a a f I 3~ O < O IN A DINOSAUR'S CLAWS 347 Little by little the form of the huge creature began to appear to him. This tiny fragment of rock grew huge to his tired eyes. Longer than a Diplodocus, bigger than a Brontosaur, the hundred feet and more of the mighty monarch of the past stretched out upon the plain, stretched as it had fallen for the last sleep on the borders of that lake ten million years ago. The cold stole into the boy's bones, and his fingers were so weary that he could scarcely hold the hammer. He piled the fire high again, and went back to his work. But the strokes fell slowly now, and the beating of the hammer in the night was labored and irregular. The high-heaped fire sent its beacon gleam against the sky and showed the shadow of the boy, striving the long night through to bring the giant of the past to light. Chip! . . . Chip! . . . The hammer fell aimlessly. Ineffectively the boy made an attempt to raise it, but his fingers were nerveless. He swayed once, twice, then fell forward on his hands across the Titan, sunk in the sleep of exhaustion. As the dawn broke, three riders, at full speed, guided by the light of the fire, came dashing down the ravine, and the first rays of the rising sun 348 THE MONSTER-HUNTERS showed them the boy asleep, pillowed on the out- crop of a Brachiosaurus, which later quarrying was to prove one of the finest of its kind. " Some paleontologist! " said the professor, and laid his overcoat over the sleeping boy. THE END U. S. SERVICE SERIES By FRANCIS ROLT-WHEELER Illustrations from photographs taken in work for U. S. Government Large 12mo Cloth $1.50 per volume "There are no better books for boys than Francis Rolt-Wheeler's 'U. S. Service Series.' " Chicago Record-Herald. THE BOY WITH THE U. S. SURVEY THIS story describes the thrilling advent- ures of members of the U. S. Geological Survey, graphically woven into a stirring narrative that both pleases and instructs. The author enjoys an intimate acquaintance with the chiefs of the various bureaus in Washing- ton, and is able to obtain at first hand the material for his books. 11 There is abundant charm and vigor in the narrative which is sure to please the boy reader* and will do much toward stimulating their patriot, ism by making them alive to the needs of conger- vatipn of the vast resources of their country." Chicago Nevus* THE BOY WITH THE U. S. FORESTERS THE life of a typical boy is followed in all its adventurous detail the mighty representative of our country's government, though young in years a youthful monarch in a vast domain of forest. Replete with information, alive with adventure, and inciting patriotism at every step, this handsome book is one to be instantly appreciated. ' It is a fascinating romance of real life in our country, and willprpve a great pleasure and inspiration to the boys who read it." The Continent, Chicago. THE BOY WITH THE U. S. CENSUS 'T'H ROUGH the experiences of a bright American boy, the author shows * how the necessary information is gathered. The securing of this of- ten involves hardship and peril, requiring journeys by dog-team in the frozen North and by launch in the alligator-filled Everglades of Florida, while the enumerator whose work lies among the dangerous criminal classes of the greater cities must take his life in his own hands. " Every young man should read this story from cover to cover, thereby getting a clear conception of conditions as they exist to-day, for such knowledge will have a clean, invigorating and healthy influence on the young growing and thinking mind." Boston Globe. For sale by all booksellers or sent postpaid on receipt of price by the publishers LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO., BOSTON THE BOY WITH THE U.S.SURVEY U. S. SERVICE SERIES By FRANCIS ROLT-WHEELER Many illustrations from photographs taken in work for U.S. Government Large 12mo Cloth $1.50 per volume " There are no better books for boys than Francis Rolt- Wheeler's * U. S. Service Series.' " Chicago Record-Herald. THE BOY WITH THE U. S. FISHERIES WITH a bright, active American youth as a hero, is told the story of the Fisheries, which in their actual importance dwarf every other human industry. The book does not lack thrilling scenes. The far Aleutian Islands have witnessed more desperate sea-fighting than has occurred elsewhere since the days of the Spanish buccaneers, and pirate craft, which the U. S. Fisheries must watch, rifle in hand, are prowling in the Behring Sea to-day. The fish-farms of the United States are as inter- esting as they are immense in their scope. * One of the best booksforboys of all ages, so attractively written and illustrated as to fascinate the reader into staying up until all hours to finish it."Pkt'IadelJ>kia Despatch. THE BOY WITH THE U. 5. INDIANS THIS book tells all about the Indian as he really was and is; the Menominee in his birch-bark canoe; the Iroquois in his wigwam in the forest; the Sioux of the plains upon his war- pony; the Apache, cruel and unyielding as his arid desert; the Pueblo Indians, with remains of ancient Spanish civilization lurking in the fast- nesses of their massed communal dwellings; the Tlingit of the Pacific Coast, with his totem-poles. With a typical bright American youth as a central figure, a good idea of a great field of national activity is given, and made thrilling in its human side by the heroism demanded by the little-known adventures of those who do the work ol " Uncle Sam." An exceedingly Interesting 1 Indian story, because it i true, and not merely a dramatic and picturesque incident of Indian life." N. Y. Times. " It tells the Indian's story in a way that will fascinate the youngster.'* Rochester Herald. For sale by all booksellers or seat postpaid oa receipt ot price by the publishers LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO., BOSTON THEBOYiWITH.THE U.S.FISHERIES THEBOYW1THTHE U.S.INDIANS THE BOY ELECTRICIAN Practical Plans for Electrical Toys and Apparatus, with an Explanation of the Principles of Every-Day Electricity By ALFRED P. MORGAN Author of "Wireless Telegraphy Construction for Amateurs** and "Wireless Telegraphy and Telephony" yx) illustrations and working drawings by the author Net t $2.00 Postpaid, $2.25 r "pHIS is the age of electricity. The most J- fascinating of all books for a boy must, therefore, be one dealing with the mystery of this ancient force and modern wonder. The best qualified of experts to instruct boys has in a book far superior to any other of its kind told not only how to MAKE all kinds of motors, telegraphs, telephones, batteries, etc., but how these appliances are used in the great industrial world. "Of all books recently published on practical electricity for the youth. ful electricians, it is doubtful if there is even one among- them that is more suited to this field. This work is recommended to every one interested in electricity and the making of electrical appliances." Popular Electricity and Modern Mechanics "This is an admirably complete and explicit handbook for boys who fall under the spell of experimenting and "tinkering" with electrical apparatus. Simple explanations of the principles involved make the operation readily understandable." Boston Transcript. 'Any boy who studies this book, and applies himself to the making and operating oi the simple apparatus therein depicted, will be usefully and happily employed. He will, furthermore, be developing into a useful citizen. For this reason we recommend it as an excellent gift for all boys with energy, appli. cation, and ambition." Electrical Record, N. Y. City. "A book to delight the hearts of ten thousand perhaps fifty thousand American boys who are interested in wireless telegranhy and that sort of thing. Any boy who has even a slight interest in things electrical, will kindle with enthusiasm at sight of this Book." Chicago News. For sale by all booksellers or sent postpaid on receipt of price by the publishers LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO., BOSTON THE HANDY BOY A Modern Handy Book of Practical and Profitable Pastimes By A. NEELY HALL Author of "The Boy Craftsman" and "Handicraft for Handy Boys" With nearly 600 illustrations and working drawings by the Author and Norman P. Hall 8vo Cloth Price, Net, $1.60 Postpaid, $1.82 A HANDY boy becomes a handy man a skilled mechanic, a practical business man, a thorough, accurate worker. That is why it is so important to encourage the boy to become handy. ' ' The Handy Boy ' ' has been written with a view to instructing the boy in the ways of doing things handily, by applying handy methods to the making and doing of hundreds of worth-while things in which he is intensely interested. Such instruction as it contains can be put to immediate use; and this naturally appeals to the boy's sense of the practical and is of infinitely more value to him than instruction which cannot possibly be of any use for years to come, because knowledge once applied is not easily forgotten. Besides developing handiness, "The Handy Boy" will encourage the boy to think for himself and to use his ingenuity ; and it will instill in him an ambition to make the best possible use of his time so that he may grow up prepared to do something and be something. " Mr. Hall's book is just the thine to put into the growing boy's hand to keep him successfully and happily employed." Des Moines Capital. "The best book of its kind that has yet been published." Boston Transcript. 'There is scarcely any boy from twelve to sixteen or seventeen that will not be delighted with such a book, and no one would fail to receive much valuable infor. mation from it." Presbyterian. "Here is a book that should be in the library of every healthy, ambitious American boy." Buffalo Commercial. " No other volume contains such a variety of wholesome, instructive, and entev taining material, nor presents so many ways of making use of the things at hand.*' Chicago Advance. For sale by all booksellers or sent postpaid on receipt of price by the publishers LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO., BOSTON HANDICRAFT FOR HANDY BOYS Practical Plans for Work and Play with Many Ideas for Earning Money By A. NEELY HALL Author of "The Boy Craftsman " With Nearly 600 Illustrations and Working-drawings by the Author and Norman P. Hall 8vo Cloth Net, $2.00 Postpaid, $2.25 THIS book is intended for boys who want the latest ideas for making things, practical plans for earning money, up-to-date suggestions for games and sports, and novelties for home and school entertainments. The author has planned the suggestions on an economical basis, providing for the use cf the things at hand, and many of the things which can be bought cheaply. Mr. Hall's books have won the confi- dence of parents, who realize that in giving them to their boys they are pro* viding wholesome occupations which will encourage self-reliance and resourceful- ness, and discourage tendencies to be extravagant. Outdoor and indoor pastimes have been given equal attention, and much of the work is closely allied to the studies of the modern grammar and high schools, as will be seen by a glance at the following list of subjects, which are only a few among those discussed in the 500 pages ol text: MANUAL TRAINING? EASILY-MADE FURNITURE; FITTING UP A BOY'S ROOM; HOME-MADE GYMNASIUM APPARATUS; A BOY'S WIRELESS TELEGRAPH OUTFIT; COASTERS AND BOB-SLEDS; MODEL AEROPLANES; PUSHMOBILES AND OTHER HOME-MADE WAGONS; A CASTLE CLUBHOUSE AND HOME-MADE ARMOR. Modern ingenious work such as the above cannot fail to develop mechanical ability in a boy, and this book will get right next to his heart. The book is a treasure house for boys who like to work with tools and hare a purpose in their working." Springfield Union, " It is a capital book for boys since it encourages them in wholesome, useful occupation, encourages self-reliance and resourcefulness and at the same time discourages extravagance." Brooklyn Times. " It Is all in this book, and if anything has got away from the author we do not know what it is." Buffalo News. For &*le by all booksellers, or sent oq receipt of postpaid price by the publishers LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO., Boston CRAFT FOR HANDY BOYS The Book of Athletics Edited by PAUL WITHINGTON With many reproductions of photographs, and with diagrams Net) $1.50 Postpaid, $1.70 NEARLY thirty college stars and champions, men like Dr. Kraen- zlein, Thorpe, Ketcham, "Sammy" White, "Eddie" Hart, Ralph Craig, "Hurry Up" Yost, Jay Camp, Homer, Jackson, F. D. Huntington, R. Norris Williams, "Eddie" Mahan, and many more tell the best there is to tell about every form of athletic contest of con- sequence. In charge of the whole work is Paul Withington, of Harvard, famous as football player, oarsman, wrestler and swimmer. " Here is a book that will serve a purpose and satisfy a need. Every important phase of sport in school and college is discussed within its covers by men who have achieved eminent success in their line. Methods of training, styles of play, and directions for attaining success are expounded in a clear, forceful, attractive manner.*' Harvard Monthly. "The book is made up under the direction of the best qualified editor to be found, Paul Withington, who is one of America's greatest amateur athletes, and who has the intellectual ability and high character requisite for presenting such a book properly. The emphasis placed upon clean living, fair play and moderation in all things makes this book as desirable educationally as it is, in every other way." Outdoor Life. " That Mr. Withington's book will be popular we do not doubt. For it contains a series of expert treatises on all important branches of outdoor sports. A very readable, practical, well-illustrated book." Boston Herald. Paul Withington \/ I For tale by all booksellers or sent on receipt of postpaid price by the publishers LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO., BOSTON < 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED EARTH SCIENCES LIBRARY This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are>ubject to immediate recall. General Library University of Californi Berkeley >tora