“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
only too 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account