I never had the patience to wait for the _finale_ of the scene; but had I done so, I should have beheld the knot float closer in, and, just after passing the victim, a tail would have come out of the water, and, with a curving blow forward, knocked the prize out from shore, and in front of the devourer's jaws. It was my good fortune, frequently, to send a Ballard rifle-ball into the pirate's eyes. In such cases there was usually a tremendous commotion in the water, accompanied by a strong smell of musk, and the wounded reptile would then make straight for shore, and run his head upon it. Under such circumstances, the creature always sought at least that much of dry land to die upon, seeming as anxious as man that its lamp of life should not be extinguished under water. This monster whose remains we were now exhuming was allied to the alligator, as one of the great family of lizards, and had died in the same manner--his head on the shores of the basin, his tail in its depths. Perhaps in the convulsion of Nature which opened a path for the waters to the ocean, and drained this inland sea, the fissure in which we stood had gaped, and exhaled poisonous gases through the whirlpool its suction created. The saurian monster of that strange age felt the hungry vortex swallowing him, which meanwhile enveloped him in deadly secretions, killing before devouring. With a last lurch through the cauldron's ebbing tide, the lizard threw himself upon its edge, and died. Of the countless millions of saurians then existing, capricious Nature had seized upon this one, to transmute it into an imperishable monument of that extinct race. In those ages of roaring waters and hissing fires, she had clothed the bones in stone, that they might withstand the gnawing tooth of time, and thus handed them down to the wondering eyes of the Nineteenth Century. Many of the pieces, it should be said, were cracked and scarred, evidently by the action of fierce heat. Constantly the earth is giving up these marvelous creations of the past, in comparison with which the animals of the present are tame enough. While we doubt a modern sea-serpent as impossible, we dig up fossilized marine monsters, which could easily have swallowed the biggest snake that credible sea-captain ever ran foul of. [Illustration: DUG-OUT.] CHAPTER XXIII. FROM SHERIDAN TO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS--THE COLORADO PORTION OF THE PLAINS--THE GIANT PINES--ATTEMPT TO PHOTOGRAPH A BUFFALO--THINGS GET MIXED--THE LEVIATHAN AT HOME--A CHAT WITH PROFESSOR COPE--TWENTY-SIX INCH OYSTERS--REPTILES AND FISHES OF THE CRETACEOUS SEA.