CHAPTER XTHE THREE-TOED HORSE
“Which it’s none o’ my funeral,” said a voice over Antoine’s shoulder, as he stood on the platform of a small station in Wyoming, waiting for Perry’s arrival, “an’ if you turns me down cold, I won’t shoot none, but what in thunder do you want with a buck-eyed, fly-eaten pinto like that?”
“To ride him,” said Antoine, laconically.
The cow-puncher snorted.
“Ride him! Why, pard, I’ve seen horned toads that could wiggle their legs a tarnation sight faster, an’ any self-respectin’ Gila Monster c’d beat him at a beauty show. Which I ain’t criticizin’ none, you understand, I’m just expressin’ my feelin’s.”
Antoine looked quietly at the broncho beside which the cowboy was standing.
“I would not enter yours at a beauty show,” he retorted.
“An’ I s’pose you’d be ekally scornful about him in a race? You might like to make a little bet on it?”
“No, no,” Antoine replied. “I would not bet against him in a race. He would run too well.”
“What makes you opine he can run?”
“I know he can run,” the young paleontologist answered. “He must run. A horse with a pelvis placed as high as that, small body well tucked in, and those long, sloping pasterns must be a racer. There is Arabian blood in that horse.”
The cowboy deftly rolled a cigarette with one hand and eyed the speaker with considerable respect.
“This is pre-cisely the nine-millionth time I’ve acted like a locoed mule,” he admitted with candor. “I had you all doped out as tenderfoot, an’ when it comes to pony talk, you’re holdin’ a straight flush against my pair o’ deuces.”
“Yes, yes, I am a tenderfoot, as you call it,” admitted Antoine, “that is, I have never been in this part of the country before.”
“Then how, in the name of a pea-green, six-toothed rattle-snake, did you get the inside rail on this little bronc’ o’ mine?”
“That is quite easy,” the young paleontologist answered. “One of the things that I know is the bones of a horse. You can tell a plow horse from a cow-pony?”
“They don’t make any liquor with kick enough in it to make me that blind,” was the reply.
“Yet the only difference is that the bones of one are heavier than those of the other,” Antoine remarked. “My eye is more trained to small differences than yours, that is all. You know horses?”
“In straight cow-country fashion, I ain’t no slouch,” the range-rider declared. “I c’n pick the best pony out of a jammed corral quicker’n a scared jack-rabbit c’n make three jumps.”
“How do you tell?”
The other thought for a moment.
“I jest takes a look at ’em an’ knows right off,” he answered. “A real cow-pony shapes up right.”
“But the shape is merely muscle and skin over the bones,” the other reminded him. “Suppose the skeletons of half a dozen horses were all mixed up in a heap, you couldn’t put them together?”
“I pass,” was the reply. “Which I’ve never made what you might call a side-partner of a skeleton.”
The paleontologist smiled.
“I have,” he said. “I have spent many yearswith skeletons as my best friends. It is my ‘game,’ as you call it.”
“How’s that?”
“You round up the cattle that are alive, I round up the animals that are dead, that have been dead millions of years. I dig them out of the rocks where they are buried.”
“Oh, I sagatiate!” the cowboy exclaimed, nodding his head comprehendingly, “you’re a bone-hunter! There’s a bunch of ’em out the other side of Blue Goose Gully.”
“Yes, yes,” the young scientist answered, “I’m one of that ‘bunch.’”
“Now I’ve got your brand,” the range-rider declared, with satisfaction. “You don’t hold nothin’ against me, pard, for not bein’ wise?”
“No, no, of course not,” Antoine retorted, “why should I?”
“Havin’ made myself look like a tumble-weed for sense,” said the other, with an air of self-disgust, “I got to get square. But I opine I c’n break even with you, after all.”
“How’s that?”
The cowboy lighted a cigarette from the ashes of his former one, and began:
“’Bout a couple o’ weeks ago, when I wasridin’ down a maverick heifer that wanted to take a bite out o’ the horizon, I turned the corner of a draw, an’ right over my head was the skull o’ some kind of critter, skull an’ a hoof. Which I ain’t superstitious none, but it did look like that ornery critter was walkin’ out o’ the rock to chase me, same as I was chasin the heifer.”
Antoine turned eagerly, but the rumble of the incoming train drowned his answer, and, a moment later, Perry jumped out, all enthusiasm and excitement. He rushed up to his friend.
“You here, Antoine! Oh, bully! The professor hadn’t told me that you were one of the party!”
Antoine replied with equally cordial greetings, for the two had remained good friends ever since the Fayum trip and had corresponded occasionally. Then the young paleontologist, turning to his new-made cowboy acquaintance, said as an introduction:
“Meet another ‘bone-hunter,’ won’t you? This is Perry Hunt.”
“Put it there!” said the Westerner, reaching out his hand. “‘Round-up Dick,’ they call me on the range.”
“Fine,” said the boy, shaking hands heartily.“I’ve always wanted to know a real cowboy. You are one, aren’t you?”
The lad’s interest was so genuine and so thoroughly boyish that the range-rider smiled broadly. He seldom smiled, but his weather-beaten face brightened marvelously when he did so.
“I’ve punched cattle since I was a shaver seven years old,” Round-up Dick answered, “an’ I’m hopin’ to wear spurs as long as there’s a township o’ range without barbed wire.”
“When your train came in, Perry,” put in Antoine, eager not to lose the chance of learning more about a possible fossil find, “I was just hearing about a bone outcrop.”
He turned to the range-rider.
“Won’t you tell me some more about that?” he asked.
“I was remarkin’,” the cow-puncher repeated, “that up to the head o’ No Wood Draw, as I was eatin’ dust to try an’ head off a maverick heifer that was headed for China, I run across a critter that looked as if it had been buried in the rock an’ was just workin’ its way out. It was standin’ straight up like as it was alive. I c’d nigh have touched the hoof with my hands as I rode by.”
“How big?” the boy queried eagerly.
The Westerner looked at the boy’s enthusiastic face and repeated his slow smile.
“The mere idee gits you all worked up, son, doesn’t it?” he said. “You looks like Hard Mouth Bill when he first prospects a faro lay-out after a couple o’ months on the range. How big, you asks? ‘Bout as big as a yearling.”
“What did it look like?”
“Looked same as any bones would. Hold up your cards a minute!” The speaker knitted his brows in perplexity. “Which I’m seemin’ to remember I did see three toes.”
“Size of a yearling! Three toes!”
The lad turned to his comrade in wild excitement.
“Oh, Antoine,” he said, “that must be a Mesohippus, the three-toed horse!”
The cowboy listened in astonishment.
“Say them words over slow,” put in Round-up Dick. “Did you remark a three-toed horse—a bronc’ with three hoofs on each foot?”
“Sure,” said Perry, “why not? There are horses with four toes, too.”
“Which I’ve got a pressin’ appointment at another part o’ the range,” said Round-up Dick,“an’ my pardner’ll be madder’n a Greaser cheated out of a cock-fight if I don’t adorn the landscape in his vicinity, but I’m tellin’ you right now that if there’s any chance o’ that critter bein’ a three-toed horse, I’ll point this bronc’s head for that spot an’ heat up that trail like it was bein’ fried. Will you ride?”
“Yes, yes,” said Antoine. “But, Mr. Round-up Dick, it may not be a three-toed horse, it may be a rhinoceros.”
The cowboy looked at him for a moment, first with a puzzled air, and then with disgust.
“Now I got the drop on the fact that you’re playin’ me along,” he said sourly, rolling another cigarette. “You c’n call it a nine-legged giraffe, if you like. For a minute there I thought you was playin’ with a straight deck.”
The Belgian looked puzzled at the phrase, but Perry burst out indignantly:
“We are playing with a straight deck, Dick,” he said. “There was a rhinoceros about the size of a big ram, and it had three toes, like all rhinoceroses have, and there were hundreds of them on the plains a million years ago.”
The cowboy looked at him shrewdly.
“You sound some like a Sioux medicine manafter a dose o’ fire-water,” he said, “but I’ve got a trustin’ nature, an’ maybe I’ll play the hand out after all. You’re willin’ to swear that there was a critter o’ that kind?”
“Word of honor,” said the boy.
“I’m satisfied,” the other replied, “I’m always willin’ to gamble an’ I push in my stack o’ chips. If that critter I saw is what you’re romancin’ about, I’ll lay one over on old Doc Gumshoe so heavy that he won’t ever have the nerve to talk again. I’ll make him look like a paralyzed stingin’ lizard. A rhino a million years old! Gents, let us amble forth!”
And, putting one toe in the stirrup, Round-up Dick floated into the saddle, while the broncho began to pirouette on his hind legs.
“We’d better follow him while he is in the mood to guide us,” said Antoine hurriedly to the boy. “Here’s your pony, Perry. I’ll tell the station agent to look after your baggage till we get back.”
Perry swung into the saddle and loped up beside the cowboy, whose pony was dancing around while Round-up Dick sat quite unconcerned.
“You’re sure a rider, Dick,” the lad said admiringly. “I wish I could sit a bucking horse like that!”
“This is no buckin’,” the other answered, “it’s jest a little playfulness. No graveyard plug for mine, thanks. Where’s your side-partner?”
“Coming right now,” answered Perry, as Antoine came round the end of the depot at a smart pace.
Round-up Dick gave a whoop, loosed his reins, and the broncho broke into a full run. The other two horses followed, and Perry, wild with delight, found that the queer-looking pinto that Antoine had brought for him was well able to keep up with the others. If anything, it was a trifle faster than his comrade’s mount, though the cowboy’s mare undoubtedly had the better stride. After a few minutes of the swift pace, the town was out of sight, and Round-up Dick pulled his pony down to a loping gait.
“You said a million years?” he queried.
“Three million would be nearer the mark,” the lad replied.
“You chuck millions o’ years around like a sport would chuck dimes to a bunch o’ Greaser kiddies,” he remarked. “Jest drive a shaft into this thick skull o’ mine an’ show me how you c’n tell about three-toed horses an’ the rest o’ the layout.”
Perry looked at Antoine, but the young paleontologist replied, in answer to the look:
“You tell him, Perry, you can make it plainer than I can.”
The boy pulled his ear meditatively.
“All right, Antoine,” he said, “I’ll do my best.”
He turned to the range-rider, and began to explain how the rocks were made, either by deposits under the sea, or by the mud carried down by rivers, or at the bottoms of lakes, or by dust carried in large quantities by the wind, or by ashes from volcanic eruptions. He showed that different kinds of animals lived at various ages, and since they all had to die, the skeleton of one kind would be found in one layer of rock, of another, in a different formation.
“Look here, Dick,” he continued, thinking out some way to make the idea clear, “suppose for a minute that you were a carver, whittling toy animals out of wood. We’ll suppose that the thing you like to carve best is a horse.”
“Happens that I do whittle,” said the cowboy, “an’ you hit the bull’s-eye first time—what I like best to whittle is ponies.”
“Good,” said Perry, feeling that his illustrationwould carry successfully. “My next ‘supposing’ won’t be as easy.”
“Shoot!”
“Supposing you lived to be a thousand years old.”
“Don’t expect to,” said Round-up Dick; “still, I c’n pipe-dream as good as the next man. All right, I’m goin’ to live a thousand years. I’m to be whittlin’ steady all the time?”
“All the time,” said the boy.
“I’d be neck-deep in shavin’s,” said the rider.
“Fine,” said Perry, “that was just the idea I wanted you to get. Now, we’ll suppose that when you started whittling you had a jack-knife, a good one, of course, sharp and all that sort of thing, but still a jack-knife. And we’ll suppose that the only kind of wood you could get hold of was pine.”
“Pine an’ a jack-knife,” agreed the cowboy. “I’ve got your trail so far.”
“You whittled these horses out of pine with a jack-knife for two hundred years straight ahead,” suggested Perry, “and any one of them that you didn’t think good enough you chucked on the floor, where it soon got buried by the shavings that came showering down. Don’t forget, Dick,you’re working like a son of a gun all this time.”
“Don’t I ever get a day off for a bust-up?” queried Dick.
“Never,” the boy replied.
“Say, pard,” the range-rider protested, “don’t ride a good horse to death, even in a pipe-dream!”
Perry laughed and continued:
“After you had whittled straight ahead for two hundred years, you’d have a pile of shavings. The only way that you could handle them would be to stamp them down, every once a while, and, if the roof leaked, the shavings would get wet when it rained and cake down on the floor pretty solidly. Maybe, after a couple of hundred years, you’d get a solid layer of trampled shavings and dust about a foot thick. And scattered through this layer would be all the poor carvings that you hadn’t thought worth saving. You get that idea all right?”
“Pat hand,” agreed the cowboy. “Go ahead.”
“Then at the end of the two hundred years, a chap comes along and looks at your work. He thinks it’s fine, but tells you that pine is so soft and the grain is so big that you can’t carve the horses as delicately as you’d like. He shows youhow oak would be a heap better. So you get hold of some oak and start whittling with oak.”
“For another two hundred years?”
“Yes,” agreed Perry. “Because the wood is harder and your knife is getting blunt—”
“Lead me to a knife that’ll whittle steady for two hundred years! Why, Bub, it would have to be a diamond! But I forgot, we were just ‘supposin’.’”
“An’ while you’re doing the best you can with that blunt knife,” the lad went on, “a fellow comes along and tells you that you’ll do a lot better if you use a chisel instead of a jack-knife. So you buy a chisel from this chap, and go ahead with your work. Now the chips from the chisel are going to be a little different from the shavings you made with the jack-knife, but they’ll be oak shavings still. Then, too, Dick, the oak being so much harder than the pine, you’ll only have half as many shavings, so it’ll take all of the four hundred years, two hundred with the jack-knife and two hundred with the chisel, to make another trampled-down layer of shavings a foot thick.”
“I see how you’re headin’,” said the cowboy, nodding wisely, “an’ in the lower six inches o’that oak stuff will be animals I whittled with the knife, and in the top half, the ones I worked out with the chisel. Is that the idee?”
“To a hair!” exclaimed Perry. “By now you’re making corking good carvings—”
“I’d be a looney if I didn’t, after six-hundred-years’ tryin’,” the cowboy interrupted.
“And then along comes another man.”
“Busy trail that,” Round-up Dick put in, who was obviously enjoying the tale thoroughly, “that’s three men in six hundred years. Not what you’d call crowded! What brilliant idee did this stranger have?”
“Boxwood,” answered the boy, “harder than oak. And for the next two hundred years you worked in boxwood.”
He paused.
“An’ after that?” queried Round-up Dick.
“Then you take a rest,” the boy suggested.
“I thought I had somethin’ comin’,” the range-rider declared, with mock relief in his voice. “Painted Pinto! Wouldn’t I make a town hum after eight hundred years without a blow-out! An’ what happens after I’m gone? Another man comes, eh? Don’t get reckless with your population, Bub!”
“Not a stranger this time,” Perry went on, “but a cyclone.”
“Which I’m feelin’ grateful you let me get away first.”
“This is a real cyclone,” the boy continued, “and we’ll suppose that it tore the shanty in half, cutting it clean across the floor, the way cyclones often do, taking half of it away in a cloud of dust, but leaving half of it as straight cut as though you’d passed a knife through a layer cake.”
“And I returns to that scene of desolation?”
“You do,” Perry assented. “And there you see the half of the shanty and the floor, which is in three layers, the bottom one of pine shavings, the next one of oak, and the top one of boxwood. Then, since you remember how you used to work, you know that there are pine animals carved with a jack-knife in the bottom layer, oak animals carved with a jack-knife in the lower part of the oak layer, oak animals carved with a chisel in the top part of that layer, and boxwood animals in the top boxwood layer.”
Antoine nodded his head approvingly.
“That is a very good figure,” he said, “I think Mr. Round-up Dick can follow that.”
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.Finding the Eohippus.The Wasatch formation, in the Bad Lands of Wyoming, in which lie skeletons of the Dawn Horse.
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.Finding the Eohippus.The Wasatch formation, in the Bad Lands of Wyoming, in which lie skeletons of the Dawn Horse.
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.
Finding the Eohippus.
The Wasatch formation, in the Bad Lands of Wyoming, in which lie skeletons of the Dawn Horse.
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.Eohippus, the Four-Toed Horse.The Dawn Horse, the earliest horse so far known, size of a large fox, adapted to low-lying and wooded ground.
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.Eohippus, the Four-Toed Horse.The Dawn Horse, the earliest horse so far known, size of a large fox, adapted to low-lying and wooded ground.
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.
Eohippus, the Four-Toed Horse.
The Dawn Horse, the earliest horse so far known, size of a large fox, adapted to low-lying and wooded ground.
“Clear as the barrel of a six-shooter a foot from your nose,” agreed the cowboy.
“Now, Dick,” Perry went on, “the real thing was a good deal that way. When Nature first started to make a horse, it came out like a four-toed creature not much bigger than a fox. The rocks that Nature was making at that time, which we call Lower Eocene, we can liken to the pine shavings. So you see, wherever you find Lower Eocene rocks you’re likely to find skeletons of that little four-toed horse, just the same way as any place in that layer of pine shavings you’d be apt to find the horses whittled out of pine. We call that horse an Eohippus.”
“That’s a whole lot of handle for a critter no bigger’n a fox!”
“‘Hippus’ means ‘horse,’ and ‘eo’ means ‘dawn,’” explained the boy, “so the Eohippus is the Dawn Horse, or the Dawn of the Horse.”
The cowboy rolled a cigarette.
“Which I’m admirin’ your lay-out a heap,” he said, “you’ve sure got a double cinch-strap on that horse stuff.”
“I ought to have,” said Perry, “it’s what I want to work at, though I haven’t had much chance in the field yet. Well,” he continued, “after afew hundred thousand years had gone by, Nature improved on the horse. She found she could make a better horse, if he was a little bigger, and that he could run quicker on three toes than on four. So in the next layer of rocks, which we call Oligocene, and which we can liken to the lower layer of the oak shavings, you’re apt to find skeletons of that three-toed horse, which is called Mesohippus, same as you’d find a knife-whittled oak horse in the lower layer of oak shavings.”
“And ‘Mesohippus’ means a ‘what-horse’?” queried Round-up Dick, remembering that ‘hippus’ was a ‘horse.’
“A middle-horse,” the boy answered, “halfway between the dawn horse and the modern horse.”
“Deal again,” said the cowboy.
“Another few hundred thousand years went by, a different series of rocks came and Nature again improved on the horse. She saw that he would be better if he were still larger, and swifter if only one toe reached the ground. So in the next layer, which corresponds, Dick, with the top part of the layer of oak shavings, we find a horse called the Protohippus. He had three toes, but only one of them touched the ground, the other two hung useless on either side.”
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.Finding the Mesohippus.The Oreodon formation, in South Dakota, with the Museum expedition in the foreground.
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.Finding the Mesohippus.The Oreodon formation, in South Dakota, with the Museum expedition in the foreground.
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.
Finding the Mesohippus.
The Oreodon formation, in South Dakota, with the Museum expedition in the foreground.
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.Mesohippus, the Three-Toed Horse.The swifter Middle Horse, the size of a coyote, adapted for hard ground: threateningly watched from a distance by Dinictis, the light-limbed sabre-tooth cat.
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.Mesohippus, the Three-Toed Horse.The swifter Middle Horse, the size of a coyote, adapted for hard ground: threateningly watched from a distance by Dinictis, the light-limbed sabre-tooth cat.
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.
Mesohippus, the Three-Toed Horse.
The swifter Middle Horse, the size of a coyote, adapted for hard ground: threateningly watched from a distance by Dinictis, the light-limbed sabre-tooth cat.
The range-rider nodded sagaciously.
“An’ what’s the face value o’ ‘Proto-hippus’?” he queried.
Perry puzzled for a moment.
“The ‘Before-Horse,’ I suppose; it’s really almost a true horse.”
“An’ the boxwood layer is the ponies o’ to-day?”
“No, Dick,” said the boy. “The next layer, which the geologists would call Pleistocene, has true horses, with a single hoof, and with the other two toes reduced to small splints of bone that don’t appear outside the skin. These are called horses. There were vast herds of them roaming over the plains.”
“An’ this little bronc,” said Round-up Dick, slapping his pony’s neck, “has come down from them, eh?”
“No,” answered Perry. “All the American horses went out, bang! Why, no one knows.”
“Where did we get the broncs, then?”
“From the Spaniards and early colonists of America.”
The cowboy looked incredulous.
“How about the Indian mustang?”
“Same thing,” asserted Perry.
“Then what did the Indians ride on before the Spaniards came?”
“They didn’t ride.”
The cowboy turned to Antoine for confirmation, and the young paleontologist nodded in support of Perry’s assertion.
“Yes, yes, he is right, Mr. Round-up Dick,” he answered. “The Indians did not have horses before the white man came. You will remember that even among the Sioux, all their early means of transport was with a dog travois, two poles dragging along the ground. When the Sioux did get horses, they merely made a longer travois.”
“What killed off all the horses?”
“It’s a mystery,” Perry answered, “no one really knows. We’ve found fossils of insects like the tse-tse fly—that’s the one that causes sleeping-sickness among the cattle in Africa—and maybe there was a plague of these flies which started an epidemic that killed off all the wild horses.”
Perry was about to plunge into a talk over the different reasons why some of the older types of animals became extinct, when suddenly, the cowboy gave a whoop and spurred his horse to the gallop. As they were riding down a gully, where the ground was very uneven, the boy was onlytoo glad to pay full attention to his mount. But the cow pony, though going at full speed, picked his way perfectly. In full career, Round-up Dick swerved round the corner of a cliff and stopped dead. Perry had just time to brace himself against being thrown over his pony’s head, when the cowboy, pointing with his finger, said:
“Give it a handle!”
Perry looked up.
There, standing out from the cliff as though it were one of the ancient bulls of Assyria, was part of the skull and the foot of an animal, the hoof pointed downwards as though the creature were going to gallop right out of the cliff.
Perry slapped his pony’s neck in the exuberance of his delight and had a few moments of unexpected war-dance.
“Antoine! Antoine!” he cried, clinging to the saddle as best he could, “do you see it?”
As the young paleontologist had been looking at the fossil steadily all the time that the lad’s pony was prancing around on its hind legs, the question was quite unnecessary, but the boy had to blow off steam.
“It is a Mesohippus!” he cried excitedly, “it is, it is, it is!”
Antoine shook his head.
“It is a Hyrachyus,” he said. Then, turning to the cowboy, he continued, “this is the three-toed rhinoceros that I told you about, Mr. Round-up Dick. And,” he added, his eyes kindling, “it may be a perfect specimen.”
“A Hyrachyus!” chanted the boy. “Gee! What a find!”
The cowboy shifted impatiently in his saddle.
“Let’s see the color o’ the cards,” he said.
Antoine shook his feet free of the stirrups, and with an ease that surprised the boy, raised himself to his feet on the saddle. Standing, the Belgian could just see into the jaw of the skull. He examined the teeth carefully, then looked down at the two eager questioners.
“It is a Hyrachyus,” he said, “an early kind of cursorial rhinoceros. That means, Mr. Round-up Dick, that he was a rhinoceros with light legs, so that he could gallop like a horse. If you look at the rock, you can see that once it was mud, probably the bank of a small river. From the position of the skeleton—of course I can see only the skull and foot—the Hyrachyus must have got stuck and was trying to pull his feet out. Buthe was stuck fast then. That was three million years ago and he is stuck fast still.”
The cowboy looked at Antoine with frank admiration.
“An’ you c’n spot the brand as quick as that!” he said. “Which I’ve got to admit that you c’n call the turn on me. What happened to those beasts, since there aren’t any of ’em on the range? Flies get them, too?”
“Sabre-tooth cats got them, I guess,” said the boy. “Although the Hyrachyus could run some, with his three toes he probably couldn’t get away from the swift sabre-tooths. When you think what a rhinoceros is like, Dick, don’t you think it was a plucky stunt for them to get out of the swamps and try to make good on the plains? Plucky, but it didn’t go. For all we know, that chap up there may have been the very last of his race, and he not only died with his boots on, but died standing up, at that.”
“What do you figure on doin’ with the bones, now you’ve got ’em?”
“Cut them out,” declared Perry.
“Right out o’ the rock?”
“We’ll take rock and all,” the boy explained. “That whole block of stone has got to be quarriedout, even if it weighs a ton. After it has got to the museum workshop in New York, workmen can spend several months carefully chipping away the rock until they get at the bones. It’s the hardest kind of work, Dick, and it has to be done by experts. Then, when every littlest bit of the rock has been chiseled away, the bones have to be mounted. We can make complete skeletons when the remains amount to at least two-thirds of the animal.”
“Which I don’t yet hog-tie the idee how you c’n tell a critter jest by his bones,” put in Round-up Dick. “You declares that cayuse in the rock is a rhinoceros the size of a sheep. There isn’t nary a hide or a bit o’ wool to tell what it looked like. So far as I can see that could ha’ been a wolf the size of a sheep or a yearlin’ cow the size of a sheep.”
“It is easy to tell by the teeth,” answered Antoine. “Didn’t you see me look at the teeth?”
“I see you was spottin’ something.”
“Teeth,” the young paleontologist answered. “It wouldn’t be a wolf, Mr. Round-up Dick, because a wolf eats flesh and his teeth are made sharp for tearing. A horse or a rhinoceros lives on grasses and plants and he has flat teeth togrind his food. You can tell almost any kind of animal at once by one tooth, and if you have all the teeth of the lower jaw, you can tell a great deal about the animal. Suppose that I found a jaw, I could tell by the teeth what food that animal lived on. If I knew what food he ate, I could tell whether he lived on the plains, or in a forest or in a swamp. If he lived on the plains, I would know that he must have been able to run fast; if he was in the forest, that he would be heavy; if in the swamp that he must have been able to swim. You see, if I found a jaw alone, I could give you a good idea of the animal.”
The cowboy stared at him in blank astonishment.
“And in this case,” Antoine continued, “I can see the feet as well. And the foot tells all about the animal’s habits. If I find teeth made to crop grass, and light feet made to run quickly over the grass, I do not have to be very clever to see that such an animal lives on a grassy plain. And if I find that in one part of the world the animal with teeth for eating grass did not develop feet to travel swiftly with, while in another part of the world it did, I do not have to think very hard to see that in the place where the animals didnot become swift they had no swift-running enemies, while in the other place they did. So you see, Mr. Round-up Dick, where the grass-cropping animals had feet that did not make them swift, I should not look for swift-running enemies, such as the American sabre-tooth tigers.”
“It’s all so plumb easy when you talk,” said the range-rider, “but I’d ha’ fought, bled, an’ died among a pile o’ bones before I’d ever ha’ thought it out.”
“Have you got pretty good teeth, Dick?” Perry asked.
“I c’n bite nails,” the cowboy answered.
“All right,” rejoined the boy, opening his mouth and pressing his thumb against his teeth. “Suppose you count them. Begin in the middle. You’ve got two teeth shaped like chisels, haven’t you, and then comes a sharp one, like the long teeth of a dog? And behind they’re all fairly flat, eh?”
“You call the turn!”
“Now, Dick, a dog has three chisel-shaped or incisor teeth, while a cow has three in the lower jaw and none in the upper jaw. Then behind that the dogs have jagged or sharp-cutting teeth, while a cow’s teeth are all more smooth. If Antoinesays that’s a rhinoceros type, it can’t have any sharp-cutting teeth like those of a dog; a rhinoceros doesn’t eat flesh, and so he doesn’t need flesh-tearing teeth to tear with. A rhinoceros browses, and so his teeth are grinders to mash the vegetation to a pulp.”
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.Smilodon, the Sabre-Tooth Tiger.One of the most ferocious of the animals against which Primitive Man had to fight his way.
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.Smilodon, the Sabre-Tooth Tiger.One of the most ferocious of the animals against which Primitive Man had to fight his way.
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.
Smilodon, the Sabre-Tooth Tiger.
One of the most ferocious of the animals against which Primitive Man had to fight his way.
“That outbids my pile!” the range-rider exclaimed. “Which I’ve always been able to hand out a pony’s age by lookin’ at his teeth, but when it comes to followin’ a trail a million years old, why, I can’t sit in for that game. But as long as you like to talk I’ll keep my ears right up, listenin’!”
Antoine looked at his watch.
“If we’re going to get to Blue Goose Gully,” he said, “I think we’ll have to start. I’ve made notes of my bearings.”
“C’n you find the place again?” queried the cowboy.
“Yes, yes, easily,” the young paleontologist answered. “It is east-south-east of that peak, north and a half west of that butte, and due east of that rocky spur. I can ride straight to it to-morrow.”
“Smooth as a card-sharp with a stacked deck,” declared the range-rider. “Which if you’reridin’ back, gents, that’s my trail, too,” and without further word, he wheeled his pony and started up the gully.
“Say, Dick,” said Perry, half an hour later, as the station came in sight in the distance, “it was bully of you to come out here and show us that Hyrachyus.”
The cowboy waved his thanks away with a gesture, but the lad continued:
“I’ve been wondering, since you’ve got so interested in that tooth idea, if you wouldn’t like one. If you want to spin a yarn you ought to have something to show!”
He put his hand to his tie and drew from it a small scarfpin made from a Zeuglodon tooth; one of those he had picked up in Zeuglodon Valley two years before.
“Here’s one,” he said, “of a whale that lived about three million years ago. Use it for a stick-pin!”
“But, pard—” the cowboy began.
“Never mind about that, go ahead,” urged the boy. “If you don’t want to take it any other way, take it just to remember this ride by. Honestly, I’ve got lots of them, and you mightn’t happen to see one again.”
The lad’s new friend protested vigorously, but it was clear that the gift appealed to him, and, just before they reached the station, Perry overcame the last of his objections. The range-rider took the stick-pin and thrust it into the band of his sombrero, taking particular delight in the little patent fastener that Perry also gave him, to prevent the pin from flying out. He flourished the sombrero with a “whoop!” and started his pony on a series of antics that would have done credit to a trick mule.
When Antoine and Perry lost sight of him, the broncho was headed across the plains like a dustwhirl, while the cowboy’s cheery “Adios!” rang in their ears.