“I have the letter here somewhere,” he said, “but I don’t seem to find it. Ah, yes! Here it is, and here’s the newspaper cutting attached to it which first called our attention to the matter. It’s from the Cheyenne Herald of a month ago. Listen to this: “Ike Izard and Doctor Dan are in town again, back from a three weeks’ bone hunting trip in the Bad Lands. Ike seems to be sober--more so than usual--but he reports a most astonishing experience, which is certainly enough to make us wonder how heavy a supply of Cheyenne bug juice he and the doctor had with them on their last trip. “It seems that they started out from Node Ranch and went into the Bad Lands as far as Walker’s Creek, pretty well covering the central eastern section of Converse county; one morning, after climbing a high mountain--Ike declares they went up at least 5,000 feet--they came suddenly upon a lake a mile or more wide and five miles long, which is not down on the maps, and so Ike took the liberty of naming it for himself, Izard Lake. “Here they went into camp and spent several days, as the shores of the lake were well strewn with fossil bones of the sort they were out after. “On the morning of the third day Ike was suddenly awakened by a strange bellowing, which seemed to come from off on the water. He shook up the doctor and they both ran out and were nearly paralyzed (question is if they weren’t entirely paralyzed the night before) at seeing a huge monster swimming toward them over the lake, bellowing like a mad bull. “Ike describes it as having a huge oval body, rounded like a turtle, about twenty feet long, from which rose an immensely long neck--Ike declares it was half as long again as the body, ending in a comparatively small head, like a snake’s head in shape, but with an enormous mouth full of monstrous teeth. “Ike says that the monster swam very gracefully, being provided with fins, which acted as paddles, two on each side. He and the doctor each took a shot at it, but in consequence of their semi-paralyzed condition the shots did nothing more than to so scare the creature that it took a header into the lake and was seen no more. “This is the biggest yarn Ike has given us yet, but he promises to think up a bigger one for the next trip into the Bad Lands. Send it along, Isaac. We shall always be glad to print any story that you may have to tell.” “There!” exclaimed Professor Poynter. “What do you think of that, Dick?” “Why, it seems to me, sir, that somebody has worked up the description of the Plesiosaurus Dolichodeirus and made a good yarn about it. Of course you don’t believe the story can be true?”