Noon came before he had reached the desired point, but the rock formations began to look familiar, more like those in which he had been working 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 something 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 fantastically 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 breakfast.
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 and a handful of oats. He took out his own sandwiches and idly tossed a crumb to a lizard basking 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. Remembering that Antoine 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 bones, and with his small geological pick, began to clear away the rock, half hopefully, half fearfully 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.