as prisoners in your camp?" asked Mr.
Merkel. "There doesn't seem to have been any excuse for that."

"Only our zeal to avoid discovery, and to keep our plans secret from a
rival college expedition," said Professor Wright. "For this I must
apologize to the boys. They stumbled in on our camp just when we had
located the bones of the Triceratops, and we feared they had come from
our rivals. I offered them all the freedom possible, if they would
give me their parole, but they saw fit not to, and I thought the end
justified the means.

"I see, now, that I made a mistake in trying to keep the boys
prisoners, though it would have been only for a short time. But they
got away."

"They sure did--with _paregoric_!" chuckled Bud.

"Well, no great harm was done," said Professor Wright. "And now that
explanations have been made, and the guilty caught," and he looked at
Del Pinzo, "we will proceed to lift out the Triceratops."

"Ten million years old!" murmured Slim. "Whew!"

"And perhaps older," said Professor Blair.

"Get ready, men!" he called to those in charge of the harnessed steers.

Then began a strange scene. The powerful animals from Diamond X ranch,
acting for the time being as beasts of burden, leaned forward in the
improvised yokes. There was the creaking of pulleys, the straining of
ropes and the squeak of wood under pressure.

Then from the great hole that had been dug, and blasted, in the earth,
there arose a mass of bones, imbedded in rock--part of the skeleton of
an ancient and prehistoric Triceratops.

This fragment of an animal--one of the Dinosaurs that roamed the
western part of America from ten to twenty-five million years
ago--before the Rocky Mountains were even formed--this fragment gave
little idea of the weird beast itself.

I have not time, or space, to tell you more about it than can be
sketched in a few words. But those of you who have seen the
restoration of these monsters, in museums, will bear me out when I say
that they must have been among the wonders of the ancient world.

The Triceratops resembled a rhinoceros as much as anything else, but
was much larger. He had comparatively short legs, a short heavy tail
and, doubtless, a very thick skin.

His skull was his most remarkable feature. On top were three horns,
the one directly over the end of his snout being short, the middle one
long and the rear slightly shorter. Back of the last horn extended a
huge, bony plate, no