"There's a rib here, a big fellow. I'm having a great time tickling it—but the big brute never quivers a hair—if he ever had any. Down there is a tooth. Would you mind taking a look and reporting on the quality of dentistry prevailing in B.C. a million?" He sat back on his heels. "I envy the advantages of those to whom my bones will be fossils. Present palæontological graveyards have not to date yielded up a single gold filling. If you wouldn't mind chalking off any outlines of bones on that patch of rock down there, you could feel that your day was not wasted."
Stamford yawned, made a few desultory marks, and sat down. The Professor continued his hacking without bothering him further.
That night there was music at the H-Lazy Z; the banks of the Red Deer canyon echoed for the first time to sounds prophetic of the day when ranches will give place to farms, farms to towns. Professor Bulkeley played, until he felt every eye fixed breathlessly on him; then he rose in confusion and insisted on Mary Aikens taking his place. To her accompaniment a chorus formed, but in a few minutes it had dwindled to a duet. Stamford and Isabel withdrew to a corner. Cockney sat smoking in gloomy silence. Even the yelping coyotes out on the prairie ceased their shuddering clamour to listen—a space of silence Imp did his resentful best to fill.
Stamford, seated by the screen in his room before climbing between the sheets, heard the voices of brother and sister over his head. After a minute he started to a guilty consciousness that he was straining to hear what they said. Noisily he jerked the window down.
It seemed to him that he had just dropped to sleep when Bean hammered at the screen to waken him for the trip to town.
On the long drive Stamford found the cowboy little more inclined to talk than was the youthful driver who had brought him out. It was a keen disappointment to the self-appointed detective, for he had counted on Bean's affection for him providing the clues that were evading him. The lanky cowboy was willing enough to talk on subjects of no possible interest to Stamford, but of the ranch he had nothing to say.
However, when, the second day afterwards, he and Bean floated on the ferry across the South Saskatchewan and climbed the cut bank toward the northern trail, Stamford felt that his trip was not wasted. For one thing he carried in his pocket a duplicate of the stable key. Also he had had a short conversation with Inspector Barker that clung to the fringes of his consciousness.
"For an invalid, Stamford," mocked the Inspector, "you strike me as no friend of the undertaker's. If I didn't know your holiday was a real loss in dollars and cents, I'd say it was undiluted laziness. I can't imagine anyone, after three months in this dollar-chasing country, sacrificing cash for chronic fatigue. Or is the fair Isabel there?"
"How did you know?" asked Stamford amiably.
"That's the little birdie that tells secrets to us married men. If she hadn't come to the mountain, then the mountain—— How's the Professor getting along with his new friends, the Red Deer dinosaurs? What's more to the point, by the way, have you come across a pair of big dogs that don't seem at home?"