"Whoa!" he shouted, pulling harder. "Mr.—Mr. Stamford, will you give to this equine problem the touch I seem to lack? If you don't, I'm going to drop these flimsy bits of leather and take the brutes in my arms.
"Some day," he went on, when Stamford had taken the reins, "I hope posterity will unearth the bones of that brute on the left—and grind them to dust. Yes, I do. Sometimes I can be really blood-thirsty. But," he grinned, "I wouldn't be surprised if they found mine at the same time, with Gee-Gee—what funny names you give your horses!—with Gee-Gee sitting on my chest enjoying his last laugh."
Mary Aikens, her eyes brimming with tears, had rushed to meet Isabel with a hungry welcome that was pathetic, seizing her hand in both her own; and Isabel, after a moment of surprise she could not conceal, flushed a little and responded with moisture in her eyes. But the few moments of the Professor's dilemmas had served to conceal the little scene that recorded more of the story of Mary Aikens' lonely life than she would willingly have exposed.
They were standing now, hand in hand, laughing on the two men. To Mary it was enough that, for the first time, another woman was to cross the threshold of the H-Lazy Z. Isabel was still, Stamford thought, the fond sister who took as much amusement as anyone from her brother's artlessness.
She turned to her hostess. "This is not merely a flying visit, Mrs. Aikens. Amos—my brother—was dissatisfied with his searching down the river. We hoped you wouldn't mind letting us camp on your ranch here while he pokes about the banks."
Beside the buckboard Professor Bulkeley was making the same request of Cockney, who had come hurriedly up from the stables.
"The Double Bar-O—that is, I believe, the technical name—seems to have been unpopular among dying dinosaurs and their forbears. Whether one should infer from that that they avoided the locality as unhealthy, or found it so healthy they couldn't die there, does not appear in the evidence. All I found there we know as much about already as about last year's weather or the origin of mumps. The further I prodded west, the more promising the outlook. This bit of bone, for instance, is, I believe, of the Upper Jurassic period. The Double Bar-O region is by comparison disreputably modern—not earlier than the Miocene. This bone appears to be blood-cousin to a megalosaurus we received once from England. It has all the——"
"I'm not quite following you, Professor." Cockney was struggling to keep his face straight.
"No, no, of course not. I'm—I'm apt to forget there are people live in the nineteenth century. I suppose they have their purpose in the scheme of life—for our progeny of the five-hundredth century to worry about, perhaps."
As he was speaking he was pulling from the buckboard the canvas and poles of a tent.