“I’d have to lead you to the spot and show you. There’s time enough. I shall want to go back and make a thorough examination of the place for science.” Bill looked up. “I’ll have to disappoint you about them stone men, professor, I run acrost the cañon yesterday where the hole went into the cave. There’s been a big slide in there. I couldn’t tell within a hundred feet, where the opening used to be. We’d have to tear down the whole mountain to find it.” Abington said nothing. Creeping into his mind again came suspicion. Had Bill ever known where there was such a cave? Surely that slide had chosen a most convenient time and place for Bill Jonathan! “I know where it was,” Bill said doggedly, as if he read the thought. “I can show you the slide; you can see it for yourself, professor.” “My college of science is not collecting slides,” Abington drawled. “Well, I must be getting back to my patient. If he’s awake, he may want to eat something.” He rose, but Bill had not finished, it seemed. He remained seated on the rock hunched over his cigarette and staring morosely across the little lake. “So you think I lied to you,” muttered Bill. “You think I’ve been stalling you along! That goes kinda tough, professor. I’ve been dodgin’ around in the hills--yes, sure I have! But I ain’t going to dodge no more and you can go to hell and hunt your own Adamses. You wait till I lead that bird in to the sheriff and make him come clean! It’s him that’ll take a ride to Carson--not me.” “And the car?” Abington asked softly, his beard hiding a smile. “Aw, hell!” growled Bill, jerked back to harsh realities. In his bitterness over the sudden frustration of his hopes, Abington would not speak a word of comfort. Not even the rich storehouse of ancient records in the labyrinth of caves could quite console him at the moment, his heart had been so set on taking back to his college a fossilized man of the Cretaceous period. He walked moodily over to the makeshift bed of his patient and stared blankly. There was no patient. A shout brought Bill and the two nosed along the cliff like hounds baffled over a warm trail suddenly wiped out with water. Because the man had been obliged to crawl, it was manifestly impossible for him to get far. Even so, they were a good half hour in running him down and then it was the slight indentations of his knees in a skift of sand behind a bush that gave the clew. Bill went down on all fours and disappeared. After a minute or two, Abington followed. It might have been an oversized badger hole, so far as outward appearances went. Even in his haste the trained mind of Abington noted a cunning arrangement of rocks deliberately piled haphazard against the cliff at some time long past, as the twisted roots of old bushes and trees clinging the twining down through the dirt-filled interstices gave mute testimony.