“There it is,” said Peggie finally, with a little throb of happy pride in her tone, as she stopped short and pointed to the great jaw-like opening a few yards away. “It’s inside there.”
Instead of going into the cave at once, as the girls expected him to do, the Doctor paused at the opening to look at the rock formation of the ledge.
“It is limestone, isn’t it?” asked Polly. “And it is certainly blue. They call this other kind of rock that crumbles, shale.”
“It’s good stuff,” the Doctor said approvingly. “Very good stuff. Now, let us go in and look at Exhibit A.”
There was no need of a light. The cave, as the girls called it, was really nothing but the great space left under the ledge by the tearing away of a mass of the earth. Peggie scrambled over the rough ground until she came to the precious bones, then stopped.
“There they are!” she cried.
Every one was wonderfully silent now. The Doctor’s face was grave too, but behind his eyeglasses his gray eyes looked keen and bright. He laid his cap to one side, and sat down deliberately beside the remains. And he “handled them, and dandled them,” as Polly said afterwards, as happily and contentedly as a mother with a brand-new baby.
“Want a pick Doctor?” called Sandy. “I can give you a hand too, if you want to dig.”
“I wouldn’t disturb it for worlds,” returned the Doctor, “I want some of my colleagues to see it, just like that. I believe we’ve struck into the perfect Jurassic drift, unsuspected in this section entirely.”
“But what is it?” asked Polly, anxiously.