“Bones? What does the child mean?” said Mrs. Sandy.
Then they coaxed her down to where the Chief sat explaining to Ted and Sue the difference between the Sioux and the Crows. And they told of the find down in Zed’s gulch. Sandy listened with steady, unblinking eyes, and brows drawn together a little.
“It must be some bear skeleton, dear,” Mrs. Sandy said. “Or maybe a buffalo, don’t you think so, Sandy?”
“Not if it’s embedded in the rock, lass. Show me how big it is, Peggie.”
And obediently Peggie measured off on the bar-post the height of the bones as close as she could guess at it.
“If it is a dinosaur, or anything like it, Chief,” Ted said, “it must be about ten million years old.”
“Don’t talk so, child, it sounds downright reckless,” hushed gentle Mrs. Sandy, just as Miss Calvert herself might have done. “Was it a monster of the deep before the flood, Sandy, dear, like the leviathan?”
“Now you’ve got me, Di,” cried the big old fellow, merrily. “How can I say for sure? When they find a toad or a frog asleep in the middle of a rock cliff, do they wake him up, and ask if he was one of the identical brood that plagued Pharaoh? There’s things that lie close hidden in the grand, still dawn of creation, and we small humanlings cannot hope to pierce the veil, or to understand the how and the why of it. But if there is a monster of the deep or of the plains either, that’s hiding away in old Zed’s gulch, we’ll haul him out, girls, and find out what he’s worth. I doubt not that he’d enjoy a sniff of fresh air at that, eh, Polly?”
Polly leaned forward, her brown eyes sparkling.
“Then I had better send word to the Doctor to come and see what it is,” she said. “I dug up a piece of the bone to-day, and sent it to him, and some of the rock around it.”