“Good morning, Dick,” he called out. “One minute, my boy, until I finish this letter; then I will talk.”
Dick waited patiently for fully fifteen minutes, after which the professor folded up his letter and motioned to him to draw up a chair.
“Dick,” he said, “we want you for another expedition. You did so well down among the fossil beds of South Carolina that we are disposed to try you again.”
“Thank you, sir,” replied Dick. “I always try to do my best. What is it to be this time?”
“Well, it isn’t bone hunting,” replied the professor, “and you will be surprised when I tell you what it is.”
Professor Poynter paused and began tumbling over the mass of papers upon his desk, leaving Dick to wonder what it all meant.
“I have the letter here somewhere,” he said, “but I don’t seem to find it. Ah, yes! Here it is, and here’s the newspaper cutting attached to it which first called our attention to the matter. It’s from the Cheyenne Herald of a month ago. Listen to this:
“Ike Izard and Doctor Dan are in town again, back from a three weeks’ bone hunting trip in the Bad Lands. Ike seems to be sober—more so than usual—but he reports a most astonishing experience, which is certainly enough to make us wonder how heavy a supply of Cheyenne bug juice he and the doctor had with them on their last trip.
“It seems that they started out from Node Ranch and went into the Bad Lands as far as Walker’s Creek, pretty well covering the central eastern section of Converse county; one morning, after climbing a high mountain—Ike declares they went up at least 5,000 feet—they came suddenly upon a lake a mile or more wide and five miles long, which is not down on the maps, and so Ike took the liberty of naming it for himself, Izard Lake.
“Here they went into camp and spent several days, as the shores of the lake were well strewn with fossil bones of the sort they were out after.