of the party was a young man who had recently escaped from college with
a large amount of knowledge which he desired to experiment with on the
people of the far west. He had heard that there was an ichthyosaurus up
somewhere along the west side of Bitter creek, and he wanted us to go
along and help him to find it.

I had been in the west some eight or nine years then and I had never
seen an ichthyosaurus myself, but I thought the young man must know his
business, so I got out my Winchester and went along with the group.

We tramped over the pale, ashy, glaring, staring stretch of desolation,
through burning, quivering days of monotony and sage brush and alkali
water and aching eyes and parched and bleeding lips and nostrils cut
through and eaten by the sharp alkaline air, mentally depressed and
physically worn out, but cheered on and braced up by the light and
joyous manner of the ever-hopeful James Trilobite Eton of Concord.

James Trilobite Eton of Concord never moaned, never gigged back or shed
a hot, remorseful tear in this powdery, hungry waste of gray, parched
ruin. No regret came forth from his lips in the midst of this mighty
cemetery, this ghastly potter's field for all that nature had ever
reared that was too poor to bear its own funeral expenses.

Now and then a lean, soiled gray coyote, without sufficient moral
courage to look a dead mule in the hind foot, slipped across the horizon
like a dirty phantom and faded into the hot and tremulous atmosphere. We
scorned such game as that and trudged on, cheered by the hope that
seemed to spring eternal in the breast of James Trilobite Eton of
Concord.

Four days we wallowed through the unchanging desolation. Four nights we
went through the motions of slumbering on the arid bosom of the wasted
earth. On the fifth day James Trilobite Eton said we were now getting
near the point where we would find what we sought. On we pressed through
the keen, rough blades of the seldom bunch-grass, over the shifting,
yellow sand and the greenish gray of the bad-land soil which never does
anything but sit around through the accumulating centuries and hold the
world together, a kind of powdery poison that delights to creep into the
nostrils of the pilgrim and steal away his brains, or when moistened by
a little snow to accumulate around the feet of the pilgrim or on the
feet of the pilgrim's mule till he has the most of an unsurveyed "forty"
on each foot, and the casual observer