“Yes, yes, it did,” answered his friend. “I should not have come into town unless it had been to meet you, and it just happened that Mr. Round-up Dick was there. We would have been most unlikely to go to No Wood Draw, and if I had not met our cowboy friend that specimen of Hyrachyus might have been lost to science forever.” “I hope I have that same Midas touch everywhere!” the lad rejoined, exultantly. “Perhaps yes, perhaps no,” the other warned him. “If you find specimens too easily, you will be disappointed when the months go by and you discover nothing. I was very lucky on my second day here, but I have not seen a single good specimen for the last two weeks and we are in the heart of the fossil country.” “Cheer up, Antoine, you might drop on one any minute!” “It is that which makes me so eager for every morning,” the young paleontologist replied. “Every day is a new day and is full of promise. And when, each day, I ride out from the camp to a point in the Bad Lands where few people have been, and where no white man has ever walked, picket my horse and start out on foot, all the spell of the explorer comes to me. “All around is the utter silence and stillness. There is no movement of clouds in the deep blue sky, there is no leaf to rustle, no sound of falling water. The sharply carved rocks, pink, red, green and slate-gray, quiver in the sunlight. There is no sign of a life, except perhaps, a lizard darting to his hole from his basking-place on a hot rock, or the black speck of a buzzard in the sky. “It is in a world so new and strange as this that I am searching for a world still more new and still more strange. And then, Perry, when, in the evening, the shadows turn all those glowing rocks to a deep purple and I ride home to camp, the gleam of the white tents is a great discovery that other people, too, are living in this unfamiliar world. I have felt, on seeing the tents in the distance, like Robinson Crusoe, alone on his island, finding a footprint in the sand.” “One does get a queer feeling about this kind of country,” said Perry, glancing round him. “In the Fayum, the real historic Egypt was so old that it only seemed a step back to the older fossil time, but here, the world seems unfinished, some way.” “There is an Indian legend that Dr. Hunt told me,” said the Belgian, “which speaks of these painted deserts. It tells that the Great Spirit who made all the world found that men were crowding everywhere and that there was no place where he could walk in peace and solitude. So, in this desert he dried the rivers and the springs that none of his human children should wish to live there; he painted the rocks that they might be more beautiful and that he might have a place to brood in during the evening of the day.