Skimmerhorn did not consider Seccombe dishonest, although the Englishman did do irregular things. He was a man of vast ideas and enthusiasms who behaved as if he had forty-two thousand head of cattle, when in reality he had only twenty-five. And every year, in his tight little Bristol office, Finlay Perkin would add up the absent stock, accept Seccombe’s estimate of how many calves should have been produced, and the truth grew even further from reality.
Some day this miserable bubble would burst. Skimmerhorn judged it might happen when the outlying portions of the ranch were lost, or when fences framed in the actual land owned. Then the cattle could be counted, and the deficit would be astonishing. In the meantime, Skimmerhorn would keep meticulous records of each transaction in which he was personally involved, and if Finlay Perkin ever wanted to see his books, their facts would stand forth with crystal clarity. Under no circumstances could Skimmerhorn betray Oliver Seccombe; he would not alert Henry Buckland to the inherent falsity of the Venneford accounts. But he would not allow Seccombe’s manipulations to contaminate him. Through the bitter experience of being the son of Colonel Frank Skimmerhorn, John had learned how fatal a lack of discipline could be. He had made himself into a man of terrible, rock-hewn integrity, unafraid of Comanche or Kansas outlaws, not hesitant to help gun down the rustlers trying to steal Potato Brumbaugh’s farm, and he would remain that way.
When Skimmerhorn left the camp, Henry Buckland remained as perplexed as ever. What it means, he reflected, is that in the cattle business the investor has to trust the manager. And he supposed he would have to trust Seccombe, in spite of doubts about book count. The fellow was congenial, and if he was what Charlotte wanted, she could do worse.
And so the last days at the camp became a period of drift during which three people moved toward decisions about which each had apprehensions. Buckland’s concerning the stability of the ranch were never dispersed.
Charlotte, seduced by the loveliness of Line Camp Four, was satisfied that come autumn Seccombe would propose to her, and she began inspecting the northern range as if she were already its proprietor. It was certainly not the life she had planned for herself, but it was acceptable.
Oliver Seccombe still felt that close association with the Bucklands could be dangerous for him. He’d had a very bad moment when Henry started boring in on details. Who could calculate to a bookkeeper’s satisfaction the number of cattle on a range so large? True, he had sold off breeding stock to get the funds to pay dividends, but many managers in Wyoming and Colorado were doing that, and if in the years ahead the calf crop was even average, the losses would easily be made up. But to give specific figures? Who could be sure that some bull found every cow in heat, or impregnated her successfully if he did. Who could possibly know how many calves were born dead on a ranch with more than five million acres? Or how many were killed by wolves? Or stolen by rustlers!
Somewhere beyond the horizon Venneford had forty-two thousand cattle. Hell, that number could now be sixty thousand, or even seventy, if the calf crop was good. As low as twenty-five thousand, as Skimmerhorn had suggested? Impossible. The cattle were out there, and when they were needed they would be found.
As he rode south with the Bucklands to ranch headquarters, they in a buckboard, he on horseback beside them, he decided to take the risk, to marry this challenging English girl and to get her father back to England as quickly as possible. Give me six good years, he said to himself, and I’ll get this thing straightened out.
When the Bucklands were installed at headquarters, he rode in to Zendt’s Farm to consult with practical Levi and imaginative Lucinda, especially the latter. Perched on a stool in their kitchen, with a cup of hot coffee clutched in his hands, he confided, “It looks as if I might marry.”
“Good!” Levi cried. “I’ve often wondered ...”
Lucinda did not speak. Instead, she rose, walked to the stool and kissed the Englishman as if he were a member of her family. Pulling one of his hands from the cup, she grasped it, then said, “It’s time.”
“One of the English girls at Cheyenne?” Levi asked with a boy’s excitement.
“Bucklands daughter.”
“She’s not much older than Clemma,” Levi blurted out, and Lucinda glared at him.
“She’s twenty-one,” Seccombe said. “And I’m ...”
“Older than I am,” Levi said bluntly. “You must be insane.”
“Wait a minute,” Lucinda said. “No man is ever too old to need a wife. God created us ...”
At this moment Clemma Zendt came in, a marvelously beautiful girl of eighteen, and she passed through the kitchen like a summer breeze, recalling flowers. She said nothing, nodded toward Seccombe, then hurried by on some important mission of her own. She seemed very young, and Seccombe was especially aware of this.
“Don’t be an old fool,” Levi counseled. “If you need a wife, get one your own age among the English families in Cheyenne.”
“Does she love you?” Lucinda asked.
“I think so.”
“Do you do well in bed?”
“Yes.”
“Then marry her.”
That was her position, and she held to it. She invited the Bucklands to dinner, and when they were seated and the roast pig was on the table—purchased from Potato Brumbaugh—she said as she poured the lapsang, “I hear you and Oliver are getting married.”
“Yes,” Charlotte said, although the matter was by no means settled.
“Good. Levi, fetch a bottle of wine,” and a startled Henry Buckland drank to the good health of his future son-in-law, a man four years older than he.
The wedding was held in Cheyenne at the home of Claude Barker, an Englishman who was putting together a mighty ranch along Horse Creek. It was a gala occasion, with champagne imported from France and singing and croquet on the lawn under torchlights.
The English community wished the newlyweds well, pleased that others from back home were settling in the territories. The affair was marred only by one slight incident. Henry Buckland, in talking with Claude Barker about the latter’s new ranch, heard Barker say, “I bought a good share of my stock from L. D. Kane.”
“Book count?” Buckland asked.
“Of course. The man’s a bounder. Probably didn’t have half the cattle he said, but what could I do? I needed his water rights.”
“Who is Kane?”
“Chap out from London. More money than brains.” Buckland thought, He has brains enough to keep on selling cattle he doesn’t have. And when he returned to Bristol he discussed this matter with Finlay Perkin, who for the first time began to view the fine figures in his books with some skepticism.
In 1875, when the buffalo were finally exterminated and the hunters went out no more, Amos Calendar appeared at Zendt’s Farm driving a large four-wheeled army wagon, his unneeded Sharps across his knees.
He was collecting buffalo bones, to be used back east for the making of fertilizer. He scoured the prairies, returning to haunts where he had slain the animals and gathering their whitening bones for delivery to the nearest railway. Selecting a spot north of Line Camp Four, he received permission from the railway to accumulate bones there until he had a carload. Then he fanned out across the prairie searching for skeletons, and travelers would report in various towns: “I was goin’ down this hill when what do you think I seen? This big wagon drawn by two mules with a skinny man holdin’ the reins, a big gun acrost his knees. And the wagon was filled with bones.”
Alone, always alone, Calendar became the hunter again, and gradually he built up at his depot a gigantic mound of bones. At intervals he placed some specially large skull on a stake with this message scrawled across its white forehead: “These bones is mine. Calendar.”
Having shot the last of the buffalo, he now seemed determined to remove from earth all visible signs that the great animal had ever existed, as if God had commanded, “You made the mess. Clean it up.” In due course he ranged westward toward Line Camp Five, where at Ch
alk Cliff his keen eye detected signs that here buffalo had once jumped to their death. For the buffalo hunter, a stand was what he dreamed of; for the bone picker it was the site of an ancient jump, because if he found such a place, he could dig it for days, exhuming the skeletons of hundreds of long-dead animals.
As Calendar was probing at the base of the cliff, Jim Lloyd came by on one of his inspections. He had not known that Calendar was in the area, but seeing him brought happy recollections of their drive north in ’68.
“Huntin’,” Calendar said when Jim asked what he had done after that. “That run out, now I’m bone collectin’.”
“Pay well?”
“Maybe nine dollars a ton.”
“These bones are pretty light,” Jim said, hefting a desiccated skull.
“They add.”
“You taking these?”
“I thought to.”
“Go ahead.”
But that night when Jim stopped by to see Clemma Zendt, he reported Calendar’s activities to her father, and next day a curious Levi rode out to Chalk Cliff—and this led to a discovery which eventually rocked intellectual circles throughout the world. For as Levi stood by, watching Calendar as he unearthed a hoard of bones which would require weeks to exhaust, he happened to look at a series of purplish rocks exposed at the base of the cliff, well below the level where the buffalo bones were, and protruding from this rock he saw what he first supposed to be part of a buffalo.
“That was some buffalo!” he said, amazed at the size of the projecting bone.
“That ain’t no buffalo,” Calendar said. “Never saw no buffalo bone inside a rock.” With the destructive urge that seemed an inherent part of his character, he lifted a large rock and was about to smash the strange bone, but Levi restrained him.
“This could be something important,” he said.
“What?”
“I don’t know. But Lucinda was readin’ in a magazine He stopped. “You leave that bone there,” he said. “I’m goin’ back to town.”
When he reached home he asked his. wife for the magazine with the story of the professor from Harvard, and with some excitement he thumbed through it and found the article he was seeking. It told of the work being done by Professor Horace Wright at Harvard in Massachusetts. Working upon principles developed in England, he had been digging in New Jersey clay pits and had come up with the bones of animals dead for millions of years. Woodcuts showed what the monstrous creatures may have looked like, and as Levi studied them he recalled that gigantic skeleton of the elephant he and Elly had seen at the museum in St. Louis.
That same night, unable to drive the visions of these ancient animals from his head, Levi rode to the telegraph station in Greeley and dispatched a telegram which was to become famous:
PROFESSOR HORACE WRIGHT
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
BELIEVE ON MY FARM COLORADO HAVE DISCOVERED BONE OF PREHISTORIC ELEPHANT STOP HAVE NOT MONEY EXCAVATE BUT OFFER YOU PRIVILEGE
LEVI ZENDT
Professor Wright, always on the search for fossils, roared out to Cheyenne by the earliest train, and there is no other verb that could more accurately describe his arrival. He was known to his contemporaries, and especially to his adversaries, as Horrible Horace, a huge, arrogant man educated in Germany and married to the daughter of a New England textile millionaire. He never visited a site; he invaded it, with two assistants and if at all possible an equal number of newspapermen and photographers. He wore formal clothes, including striped pants, even when at work on a dig, and although he had been photographed numerous times at various dramatic excavations, he was never shown without a top hat.
He delighted in convening the press wherever he worked and announcing to them: “Gentlemen, we have this day uncovered one of the most remarkable secrets in the history of mankind.” He was hated by those who worked for him and despised by his rivals at Yale. He was insufferable, pompous and brilliant, and he did more for the advancement of paleontology than any other man in the history of American science.
At Cheyenne he hired four wagons, two tents and a cook, and like an emperor, moved south to Chalk Cliff. Levi Zendt and Jim Lloyd were waiting for him, and when they saw a cloud of dust to the east Jim said, “Maybe the army is escorting him,” but it was only Horrible Horace traveling in customary style.
He ordered his driver to draw the wagon close to the cliff, and majestically dismounted, a man over six feet tall plus his top hat. Striding with sure instinct to the spot where Levi had found the bone, he ignored it. Dropping to his knees, he spent fifteen or twenty minutes inspecting the basic rock from which the bone projected, and as he poked and probed, he grunted with deep satisfaction, like a hog finding acorns.
He summoned his assistants and pointed out to them the characteristics of this base rock, then asked in haughty tones, “Well, gentlemen, what is it?”
“Morrison?” one of the young men asked hesitantly.
“Of course it’s Morrison!” he exploded. “You dunderheads, look at the purple color, the alternate clays, the texture. What else could it be but Morrison?”
Even now he did not bother to look at the bone itself. Instead, he summoned the lone newspaperman he had bullied into coming down from Cheyenne, and proclaimed, “Sir, you may inform the waiting world that here on the property of this good man,” and he placed his right arm benignly about the shoulder of Levi Zendt, “I have discovered the bones of a great dinosaur ...”
“Elephant?” Levi asked. “Infinitely older.”
“How old?” the reporter asked.
“One million years ... two million.”
“You haven’t looked at the bone yet,” the reporter pointed out.
“My good man,” Professor Wright said condescendingly as he kicked at the base rock. “This is Morrison. Do you understand that? Morrison!”
“Who’s Morrison?” the reporter asked.
“It’s a formation!” Realizing that he was antagonizing the press, he abandoned Levi and placed his encompassing arm about the reporter. “It’s a purplish formation of clay and rock. It exists in a small belt throughout the west, and where you find Morrison, you find dinosaurs. Now this one ...”
At last he attended to the bone, and as he did so his jaw dropped. “My hammer,” he said in a whisper, and when he had it, he tapped ever so delicately at the rock which embedded the bone, then moved along the face of the cliff, returning to the men with a look of positive awe upon his face. All the pomposity was gone and he became a man staggered by good fortune.
“My God!” he said. “It looks as if we have a complete dinosaur.”
The reporter asked, “Would that be a good find ... important?”
“It would be notable,” Wright said in a low voice.
“What can I call it? What name?”
“That we cannot tell,” Wright said.
He worked like a demon, calling for flour and old newspapers, from which he made a heavy protective paste in which to envelop the bones. In the days that followed, newsmen and photographers came from all parts of America to watch, and every new visitor who saw the imposing chalk cliff assumed that the bones lay imbedded in it, and they were surprised to find Professor Wright laboring away in the purplish deposits at the base of the cliff.
“This is the Morrison,” he explained over and over, and he laid out stakes to indicate the incredible extent of the skeleton on which he was working. “Maybe seventy feet,” he said, and even the most skeptical visitor had to be impressed.
Finally the day came when he felt prepared to issue a formal communiqué, so he assembled the press and visiting scientists and stood before them in a black suit and top hat. “Gentlemen,” he said gravely, “I have the honor to announce that on this site I have uncovered the complete articulated skeleton of a dinosaur which reached to the length of seventy-seven feet and weighed in the vicinity of thirty tons. Not a single bone is missing, and this must stand as one of the supreme f
inds of all times.”
He went on to disclose that the skeleton, when excavated, would go to a museum in Berlin. “But,” someone asked, “if it’s as great a find as you say it is, and it was discovered in America, why do you allow it to go to Germany?”
“The world of science is international,” he proclaimed. “Museums in Germany aided me when I was starting. Now I shall aid them.”
This launched somewhat of an argument, which ended when Levi Zendt pointed out that the skeleton actually belonged to him, since it was found on his property, and he agreed with Professor Wright. He, Zendt, had come from Germany—that is, his family had—and it was only proper that he send a gift back to the home country.
“Thank you, my good man,” Wright said. “I knew I could count on you.”