FOUR

Barnum Brown walked along the edge of the rocky promontory, the one that from a distance resembled an old woman bending over, stooped from age. The men in the camp had already dubbed it "The Widow," and it did sort of resemble an elderly woman grieving for her lost husband. He winced every time he heard it. Most of the men did not know his own wife had passed away recently, and would have been abashed to learn of the inadvertent pain they caused him with the nickname, but he didn’t want to make them feel bad so he kept silent. Marion. It was only six years until death did them part. She left a hole in his heart that was too big to contemplate; he could not even walk near its edge to look over. He would turn away and busy himself by digging in the dirt like a little boy.

The Widow. The men were clever. Maybe he would just have to work them so hard they would not have time for such things. He should really draw some strength from the nickname of this rock, though. The image of the old woman, her agony frozen into a towering pile of minerals, should give him comfort, let him know that others had felt his pain since time began. He thought about that but it really didn’t help. Only work could make him feel better. He needed to quit looking at this woman as a woman and start looking at her as a pile of rocks, a pile of rocks that could hide a treasure trove of dinosaur bones. Now, if anyone knew something about pain, it was dinosaurs. They hurt so much they had ceased to exist, had fallen forgotten into the bowels of the earth. He intended to bring them back.

"Around this way, men," he said, and the first three assistants to arrive on the scene walked with him.

They were students from Kansas, so eager to learn they had gotten here first and had camped out for three days waiting for him to arrive. They must have been in dire need of entertainment, and he hoped they were at least good conversationalists or had a complete deck of cards, because there was nothing out here for a young man to do except work. The town of Jordan was little more than a few houses that happened to be close to one another, and around it stretched miles of emptiness. The rest of his party had gone to Miles City, a hundred miles away, hopefully bringing back enough supplies for at least a month. In the meantime, he had locations to scout.

"We found parts of some very significant dinosaurs here two years ago, near this very site," Brown told the students, and they nodded.

"Yes, sir," said the one named Raymond. "We have read about that. I believe Professor Osborn named it Tyrannosaurus rex."

Brown smiled. They had done their homework. The find was not widely known outside paleontological circles.

"That’s right. King Tyrant Lizard. A pretty impressive name for a pretty impressive beast. What else do you know of this specimen, Mr. Harryhausen?"

"Not much, unfortunately," Raymond replied. "You didn’t find the skull or the arms, so you’re not sure exactly what it looked like."

"That’s right. We just know it was big, probably the biggest predator in the Cretaceous Period. Maybe the biggest predator in any period, which is why Professor Osborn’s name wasn’t so far off the mark."

He chuckled at the thought of his friend Henry Fairfield Osborn. They had once dug fossils together in the field, even had a bit of a rivalry, although nothing along the lines of the famous Cope-Marsh feud. As Osborn’s middle had expanded, he had come to prefer the familiar comforts of civilization to the rigors of field work. Brown was beginning to see the attraction of the idea, but he still felt his blood pump a little faster as he looked at a column of rock and imagined the bones trapped inside.

"I think we will make this rock face the base of our operations," Brown told the students. "We’ll start about here and work our way down. The ground’s not too steep so we shouldn’t have much trouble getting the carts around this to pull the stuff out."

The Widow dominated the extreme southern tip of an expanse of rock which had worn to the point that the dinosaur bones should be fairly easy to find. Most of the area had weathered down to the Cretaceous Period, the last great age of the dinosaurs, the end of the Mesozoic. The Cretaceous was the dinosaur swan song, the last defiant roar before the tiny, insignificant mammals took over. On his last trip here, some fossilized bones were sticking right out of the rock, like the ribs at some Cretaceous buffet. Getting them out was no easy trick, but at least they were not hard to find.

Edward Drinker Cope had once had some luck near here, where he found a very good skeleton of a Monoclonius, a Cretaceous herbivore. Brown wondered why he had not done more digging in Montana than he had. Just for an instant he remembered the strange woman and her tale of space creatures, but he quickly brushed it away from his mind. Space creatures or no, Cope and Marsh wouldn’t let anything scare them away from good bone ground. Or would they? He walked close to the rock, so close he could barely focus on it. No bones were evident, not yet. He heard the students whispering behind him.

"I heard he can smell the fossils," Harryhausen whispered to his friends.

Brown smiled slightly, although he didn’t let them see. Osborn had started that rumor about him, in jest, of course, but he had to admit it pleased him and so he felt no inclination to dissuade its spread. He did have a demonstrated knack for finding bones, so perhaps it was not far from the truth.

"Let’s walk around here," he said, straightening up. The whispering stopped. "I want to see if there are any shortcuts through the rocks so we don’t have to run the carts the long way all the time."

He began striding around the western edge of the Widow, the students following behind like ducklings pursuing a mother duck. The rock wall edged southwest for a while and then moved back to the center, forming a natural windbreak, one that would make good shelter. As he approached, he saw that it was being used for just that purpose.

"Hands up!" a voice called to him. He froze and put his hands in the air, and the startled students followed suit.

A man edged around the rock face. Not a man, actually. A boy, one who needed a few years on him to even be as old as the students who stared at him with fear and disbelief. Everything they had heard about the old Wild West was true! The young man approached, working his jaw slowly, like a malevolent cow. His clothes hung on his lanky frame. His face was unlined and round, but his blonde hair was dirty and stuck out at all angles like straw. The young man looked like a living scarecrow, a scarecrow that packed a pistol.

"What are y’all doing here?" the scarecrow drawled.

Brown could see two other young men hunched in the windbreak, a half-empty bottle and a pack of cards between them. They watched the confrontation with mild interest, as if confident that any one of them could handle three interlopers.

"I said what are y’all doing here?"

"We’re looking for fossils," Brown said, looking him straight in the eye. "Mineralized dinosaur bones, to be exact, dating from the Cretaceous Period. Herbivores, carnivores, omnivores, what have you."

The young man looked suitably baffled. He frowned and gave a tug on the waist of his ill-fitting trousers with his free hand, but Brown noticed that the gun barrel did not waver an inch.

"Well. Are they worth any money?"

"No," Brown said, which was not exactly true. "We are searching for them purely in the interest of science."

What little light was visible in the young man’s eyes dimmed immediately.

"Oh."

"May I ask what you are doing here?" Brown ventured. "There does not seem to be much in the way of entertainment."

The young man’s companions interrupted what looked like a poker game to laugh. He turned and spat a thick brown stream of tobacco juiced and then joined them in a chuckle.

"There will be plenty of entertainment real soon," he said. "Yes, sir. Didn’t you hear nothing about Luther Gumpson?"

Brown shook his head.

"I—I heard something," said one of the students, a young man named Simon. "He robbed some banks back east."

The scarecrow moved the gun to point at Simon when he began speaking, as if he was ready to shoot upon hearing anything objectionable.

"That’s right," the scarecrow said, nodding.

Brown noticed that the gun barrel stayed dead level no matter what its owner did with the rest of his body. If he nodded his head, it stayed stock-still. If he moved the gun, it traveled in a plane exactly horizontal to the ground. This kid knew what he was doing when it came to the shooting iron.

"Anyhow, Luther Gumpson took off and headed west, and word is he’s out this way. A farmer said he gave him a ride to these parts, dropped him off not half an hour away. There’s a big reward. Shooters from all over are coming to collect. I intend to be the one to do it."

"Well, good luck to you. If you don’t mind, we need to be heading along," Brown said.

The scarecrow eyed him curiously.

"Say, you seem to be dressed a little fancy for someone digging in the dirt," he said, running his gaze along Brown’s neatly pressed shirt and creased slacks. "You sure you’re not a sheriff, out with your deputies looking for me?"

It took Brown just a second to follow him.

"Looking for you? I thought if I were a sheriff, I should be looking for this Gumpson fellow."

The boy snorted, but Brown could not tell if it was from disgust at Gumpson’s name or if he merely needed to clear some undesirable substance from his nose.

"Gumpson’s good, but I’m better. You may have heard of me," the scarecrow said. "I’m William H. Kinney."

Brown paused for a moment, looking upward to the right and the left in a parody of thought.

"Don’t recollect. Should I have?"

The kid seemed frustrated. He shrugged his shoulders and spat another thick stream of tobacco juice, although again Brown noticed the gun was as steady as a tree limb.

"Didn’t you hear tell of the Fort McCagle massacre? The shootout at Plains City, Kansas? None of them?"

Brown heard a murmuring behind him. He turned his head, slowly, to see the students whispering again, in some agitation.

"Deputies!" Brown said. "Have you heard of this man?"

"Yes, sir," Harryhausen piped up uncertainly. "They call him the Plains Kid. He’s sort of notorious. The papers write him up now and then."

"Not enough," the Plains Kid said, a scowl on his baby face. "They also call me William the Conqueror sometimes, and I like that one better. I don’t know where they got that name, but I like it."

"William the Conqueror," Brown said. "He was the Duke of Normandy. He took over England at the Battle of Hastings in the year 1066."

The kid seemed impressed.

"Well, that’s something fine. But even Billy the Kid gets wrote up more than I do, and he’s been dead a long time. He only shot twenty-one men."

"You have beat him at that, I assume," Brown said.

"Yes, sir, I have. Fifty men by my last count, and I ain’t so good with numbers. Ain’t that right, boys?"

The young men behind him, now bored with the conversation, grunted their agreement, never once taking their eyes off their cards.

"So you think you want to try to run me in, lawman?"

"I was joking," Brown said. "I am no sheriff and these two men are certainly no deputies. My name is Barnum Brown. You may search us until you grow tired and you will find no weapons or badges of any sort. We are as I said, scientists. I am dressed in the manner I am because we are not digging today, and at any rate I hold the fossils we find in great respect, and don’t mind dressing up for them a little."

"Let him alone, Kid," one of the Plains Kid’s companions said. "No sheriff talks all fancy like that. Shoot us something to eat if you want to shoot something. He don’t look to have enough meat on his bones to suit me."

"Shut up," Kid said. "Barnum, huh? You any kin to that feller that runs the circus?"

He had heard this question before.

"No. There is a connection, however. Mr. P.T. Barnum was passing through my hometown in Kansas when my mother was carrying me. When I was born, his name stuck in her mind and so she gave it to me."

The Plains Kid had clearly been counting on a more interesting story than that. Like his companions, he appeared to be growing bored with the confrontation. He seemed the sort who would find it difficult to carry on a conversation unless it eventually resulted in shooting, or a fistfight at the very least.

"So you was never with the circus? Never saw the lions and tigers and all?"

"I hate to disappoint you, but most of the creatures I have any dealings with are long dead."

The Plains Kid nodded.

"All right, mister, you can go. But keep your eyes out for that Gumpson, and tell the folks around these parts that William the Conqueror is in town. And if you hear any shooting, don’t bother to duck. I only hit what I’m aimin’ at."

In the space of time it took Brown to blink his eyes, the scarecrow had put his gun away and stood smiling at them through stained teeth.

"Well, fine," Brown said. "That’s very comforting. Nice to meet you, Mr. Conqueror. We will attempt to stay out of your way as best we can."

"Your choice," William the Conqueror said.

Brown and his students headed back the way they had come. They could wait another day to find a shortcut, but he certainly hoped the scruffy youths were not going to make the rocks their hideout for the duration of their stay. Being around hotheads with guns would not make for a relaxed work crew.

"Some people don’t seem to have it through their heads that the Wild West is over," Brown said once he figured they were out of earshot. "Those boys should be riding with Wild Bill Hickok’s show, not be out here fooling around. They’re only about twenty years too late."

"Why did he tell you his name if he’s a wanted criminal?" one of the students asked, nervously.

"It does no good to be wanted if no one knows you’re here," Brown said. "Even the notorious have to do a little advertising now and then."

"I have read a little about him," Harryhausen said, and his companions nodded nervously. "He did shoot a good number of people."

"Well, let’s steer clear of him, then. Maybe I should alert the authorities, if I can figure out who the authorities are."

"First this Luther Gumpson and now the Plains Kid," Harryhausen said. "You said this would be a quiet, boring dig."

Brown laughed out loud and clapped Harryhausen on the shoulder.

"I did, at that. I may have miscalculated. Boys, this summer could be more lively than we expected. Be ready for anything."