"Then, before the earthquakes, the Salt
Lakes were fresh?" rejoined the hammock.

"There was fresh water west of the
Rockies and south of---- Why," cried
the professor, interrupting himself, "when
I was in Wyoming and around there, this
spring, in what they call the Bad Lands,--
cliffs and buttes of indurated yellow clay and
sandstone, worn and carved out by floods
long before the Aztecs started to move out
of Canada,--I saw fossil bones sticking out
of the cliffs, the least of which would make
the fortune of a museum. That was between
the Rockies and the Wahsatch."

"People's bones?" asked the hammock,
agitating itself again, and showing a glimpse
of a smooth throat and a slender ankle.

"Bless my soul! If there were people
in those days they must have had an anxious
time of it!" returned the sage. "No, no,
my dear. There was brontosaurus, and
atlantosaurus, and hydrosaurus, and iguanodon,
--lizards, you know, not like these little
black fellows that run about in the pulverized
feldspar here, but chaps eighty or a hundred
feet long, and twenty or thirty high; and