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 unwitting 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 that should bring some monstrous creature from its ten-million-year-old grave.
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 outcrops 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 landmarks 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 homeward guide. He could see it nowhere! And, while he watched, he saw shapes that had been 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.