“What have you found?” said the doctor.
“The jaguars must have killed a man here, father,” replied the boy, who looked on in disgust as his father stepped in and picked up a skull which might have lain there, sheltered by the roofing of stone, for ages. It looked brown and as if very little pressure would suffice to crumble it up into dust; but the teeth left in the upper jaw were perfect and fairly white.
“Ah!” said the doctor thoughtfully. “Here’s a bit of genuine history at last.”
“Killed by a jaguar, father?” cried Chris excitedly.
“No, my boy,” was the reply; “this is not the marking of a jaguar’s teeth, but the cause of death, plainly enough.”
“What, that hole?” cried Chris excitedly.
“Yes. Look, the forehead has been crushed in by the blow from a stone axe, or possibly by a stone hurled from above.”
“Perhaps only held in the hand, sir,” said Griggs thoughtfully.
“Why, that’s a heap of old bones,” cried Ned, with a look of horror; “the dust’s full of them.”
“Yes,” said the doctor, moving the relics carefully with the butt of his rifle for fragments that were fully defined as to shape to fall together as mere dust and hide portions below. “There’s another skull,” continued the examiner, “crushed in more than the first. A finely-preserved specimen, for, in spite of that hole, it shows the shape of the relic—a low forehead, retreating very rapidly, the brows very bony and heavy, and the cheek-bones widely prominent.”