| Show the old settler my aty dear san Jua ners I 1 word came that they had found the old fellows track where he i crossed a mud flat headed along I 1 the river to the northeast considerable sid erable excitement grew out of the report and as I 1 talked with a 41 climber amber of people who had seen the track I 1 wondered that no one cne had ventured to follow it very far nor to make a guess where the old fellow had ha d gone it was all very exciting and confusing and intriguing and a lot of other things until although I 1 give any sensible reason for my resolution I 1 resolved 0 drop everything and take a personal look at the eld dd boys track and bring my un unusual u sual wisdom to bear on oil the p problem of where he had gone and why no one was sufficiently interested to follow him up so I 1 went all the way down there and bent over the imprint of his ungainly old feet in the mud speculating on ii the depths and spacing of the tracks as to whether or not he was frightened and in a hurry or whether he felt self sufficient and safe to take his time ard and then I 1 set my massive brain to work on the problem of how long it had been since the track was made for the older the track the more distant and unlikely of apprehension the fellow who made it well no question about the track having been made in the mud but enough time had elapsed since then for the mud to become hard as portland cement als since the track had been made a great body of water had surged over it yes a whole big deep ocean of water had come up loaded with sand and sediment under hundreds cf feet of strata layers of sand clay lime and all of these too had turned to solid rock that process of depositing and petrifying petrify ing all these layers took look quite some time let me see for I 1 must be accurate in my figures it took years six months and seventeen days but now the track was buried deep in the earth and ri nc one could see it till that ocean or some other ocean began pulling all that building down by slow degrees anstak and taking the material away for another I 1 building somewhere else it was an awfully slow process and a lot of important things happened before it was accomplished in fact it lacked only five months and continued on page 12 the old settler con continued inked irom from nag nac 1 seventeen days cf taking as long to tear it down as it took to build it up so S it is plain to see that it took 0 years and eighteen days to pile it up on that track and then to take it away now please 30 do not deml embarrass abrass me by challenging my figures but go down dawn there and read them on the rocks for yourself yo urselL of course in this building up or tearing down the hydraulic appliances were so violent that the old 1 river iver which once ran by the mud flat was completely disrupted its watershed demolished its former altitudes all upset besides doing away with the river it has cut a great gulch feet deep right r i g h t across what used to be the river bed so that now the track of that old dinosaur instead of being along a muddy flat by a slow moving biver is on the dizzy edge of a high cliff when I 1 remembered that I 1 had gone there primarily to follow the old fellows track I 1 followed them near to the terrifying rim and drew back in fear to sit on a rock 2 thrust my fingers through my perspiring hair and conceded it was wa s after all quite a difficult problem ALBERT R LYMAN LYMAM |
