spoke to me about it. I didn't believe him then, it sounded
so wonderful, but Mr. Pennypacker says it's all true. There's a great
salt spring, boiling out of the ground in the middle of a kind of marsh,
and all around it, for a long distance, are piled hundreds of large
bones, the bones of gigantic animals, bigger than any that walk the
earth to-day."

"See here, Paul," said Henry scornfully, "you can't stuff my ears with
mush like that. I guess you were reading one of the master's old
romances, and then had a dream. Wake up, Paul!"

"It's true every word of it!"

"Then if there were such big animals, why don't we see 'em sometimes
running through the forest?"

"My, they've all been dead millions of years and their bones have been
preserved there in the marsh. They lived in another geologic era--that's
what Mr. Pennypacker calls it--and animals as tall as trees strolled up
and down over the land and were the lords of creation."

Henry puckered his lips and emitted a long whistle of incredulity.

"Paul," he said, reprovingly, "you do certainly have the gift of
speech."

But Paul was not offended at his chum's disbelief.

"I'm going to prove to you, Henry, that it's true," he said. "Mr.
Pennypacker says it's so, he never tells a falsehood and he's a scholar,
too. But you and I have got to go with the salt-makers, Henry, and we'll
see it all. I guess if you look on it with your own eyes you'll believe
it."

"Of course," said Henry, "and of course I'll go if I can."

A trip through the forest and new country to the great salt spring was
temptation enough in itself, without the addition of the fields of big
bones, and that night in both the Ware and Cotter homes, eloquent boys
gave cogent reasons why they should go with the band.

"Father," said Henry, "there isn't much to do here just now, and they'll
want me up at Big Bone Lick, helping to boil the salt and a lot of
things."

Mr. Ware smiled. Henry, like most boys, seldom showed much zeal for
manual labor. But Henry went on undaunted.

"We won't run any risk. No Indians are in Kentucky now and, father, I
want to go awful bad."

Mr. Ware smiled again at the closing avowal, which was so frank. Just at
that moment in another home another boy was saying almost exactly the
same things, and another father ventured the same answer that Mr. Ware
did, in practically the same words such as these:

"Well, my son, as it is to be a good strong company of careful and