Dismounting on the instant, he slung out the canteen, and, finding a slightly hollowed rock in a shadowed place where it had not been turned to blister-heat by the sun, gave his pony a drink and a handful of oats. He took out his own sandwiches and idly tossed a crumb to a lizard basking on a rock hard by. The little brown creature snatched the crumb, and with a flicker of his tail, disappeared. Idly, his lunch over, Perry followed where the lizard had gone and stooped down to look into the hole. “If a chap could only multiply that lizard by about a hundred times,” he said to himself, “it wouldn’t be so awfully far from a Diplodocus. A hundred times as long—” He stopped. “A hundred times—” What was that queer exposure in the rock? He rubbed his eyes. Remembering that Antoine had warned him of the strange appearances that seemed to come in the glare of those painted rocks, he turned away and looked into the shadow. Then, hardly daring to trust his eyes, he walked over quietly and softly to a long, low mound, from three inches to a foot above the surface, which ran along the edge of a small gully. A long broken line of weathered bone met his gaze. Feverishly, hardly daring yet to believe that it might be true, he fell on his knees beside the bones, and with his small geological pick, began to clear away the rock, half hopefully, half fearfully seeking to make sure. The rock was fairly soft. Soon, at the end nearest to him, one of the larger bones showed clear, as the sun and weather had cracked the rock around it. Chip, chip, chip! The minutes and the hours passed, but the boy, down beside the brown bones on the ground, knew nothing of the time. Forty feet away, the pony plucked at the scanty herbage, but Perry never took his eyes off from the ground. The rock was not hard, and was sufficiently rotted to break under the pick, and by fractions of an inch the bones grew clearer. Chip! Chip! Chip! Over the mountains to the westward the sun began to fall, the shimmering heat of the desert cleared and the distant buttes glowed purple. But, though the boy’s arm was aching and his back was stiff from long stooping, he was as unwitting of the pain as of the waning light, and the blows of the little hammer came down with ceaseless regularity, telling the strokes of doom that should bring some monstrous creature from its ten-million-year-old grave. Chip! Chip! Chip! The rim of the sun had touched the further hills, when, still in a daze, the boy straightened up and looked at what he had uncovered. Small though was the head, fragmentary as was the amount of rock he had removed, he added hope and imagination to knowledge and envisioned the whole. The monstrous length of neck which he felt sure must be the meaning of those slight outcrops hinted a colossal story. He paced the whole line of the skeleton. One! Two! Three!—Thirty-four paces! One hundred and two feet! It could not be! But, returning his steps, the paces came to the same.