“Then like as not these here is elephants’ bones,” remarked Jalap Coombs. “I were jest thinking as how this one had a look of ivory about it.”
“They may be,” assented Phil, dubiously, “but they must have belonged to pretty huge old elephants; for I don’t believe Jumbo’s bones would look like more than toothpicks alongside some of these. It is more likely that they belonged to hairy mammoths, or mastodons, or megatheriums, or plessiosauruses, or fellows like that.”
“I don’t know as I ever met up with any of them, nor yet heerd tell of ’em,” replied Jalap Coombs, simply, “onless what you’ve jest said is the Latin names of rhinocerosses or hoponthomases or giraffles, of which my old friend Kite Roberson useter speak quite frequent. He allus said consarning ’em, though, that they’d best be let alone, for lions nor yet taggers warn’t a sarcumstance to ’em. Now ef these here bones belonged to any sich critters as them, he sartainly knowed what he were talking about, and I for one are well pleased that they all went dead afore we hove in sight.”
“I don’t know but what I am too,” assented Phil, “for at close range I expect it would be safer to meet one of Mr. Robinson’s taggers. Still, I would like to have seen them from a safe place, like the top of Groton Monument or behind the bars of a bank vault. Where are you going, Serge?”
“Going for some wood that isn’t quite so prehistoric and that will blaze,” answered the other lad, who had picked up an axe and was stepping towards the entrance to the cavern.
“That’s a scheme! Come on, Mr. Coombs. Let’s help him tackle that up-to-date log outside, and see if we can’t get a modern illumination out of it,” suggested Phil.
So they chopped vigorously at the ice-bound drift-log that had induced them to halt at that point, and half an hour later the gloom of their cavern was dispelled by a roaring, snapping, up-to-date blaze. By its cheerful light they examined with intense interest the great fossil bones that, in various stages of preservation, lay scattered about them.
“I should think a whole herd of mammoths must have perished at once,” said Phil. “Probably they were being hunted by some antediluvian Siwash and got bogged in a quicksand. How I wish we could see a whole one! But, great Scott! now we have gone and done it!”