HE month dragged. Hugh received long letters from Miriam and wrote even longer ones in return. Miriam made no attempt to direct Hugh’s effort to save his fossil field. But she urged him on to the fight by a sympathy that intoxicated him as regularly as her letters came. But in spite of the letters the days in The Lariat were long. The big snows that arrived with December prevented any one from the outlying ranches from visiting Fort Sioux, and except for Principal Jones and Red Wolf, The Lariat was unpatronized. The old Indian’s efforts to cheer Hugh up were unceasing. Not a week passed that he did not come prowling into the shop with some curious memento of the tribe and carry on a long, haggling barter for a book. The trading was, to say the least, unique and was the only bright spot in the long month. Hugh always carried on the negotiations himself, for the old Sioux openly scorned doing business with Fred. They traded a pair of polished buffalo horns for a copy of Artemus Ward. A beaded “kinne-ki-nick” bag for a cheap and very gaudily bound reproduction of Hogarth’s Rake's Progress. A buckskin belt and a dilapidated war bonnet for a second-hand set entitled, Pictorial History of the Civil War. The final triumph for both sides, however, was the trading of a necklace made up of teeth—bear teeth, buffalo teeth, snake fangs, the teeth of Red Wolf’s father and of his first wife and of several of his own, all strung on a deer sinew, as pliable as silk—for a copy of the life of Queen Victoria. The old chief fell violently in love with a picture of the old queen at her stoutest and would have bartered his tepee, containing his present squaw, if it had been necessary, to close the bargain.
The day after Christmas, Hugh returned to Cheyenne, and within two days’ time he had procured an appointment to present his case before the commission. His was the first business brought up when the morning session was called. John Houghton introduced Hugh to the members and he was invited to join the group around the mahogany table.
This was quite a different matter from telling his tale to the barber-shop group, or to Miriam, or to the Conservation and Children’s Code Committees. These were hard-headed, experienced politicians, all of whom had expressed an entire impatience with Hugh’s plea. He had thought constantly in the past month of what he could say that might reach them. He knew that the scientific plea would not touch them. He knew that there could be no appeal to their state pride. Their record precluded the possibility of their having any. He believed that there was small chance of what Mrs. Morgan had called his personality beguiling them. And he sat forward in the chair they had given him at the table, and opened his mouth to speak without any real idea of what he would say.
And he began, to his own astonishment, to talk of his Uncle Bookie. Every man at the table had known the former owner of The Lariat. Old Charley Whitson, the chairman, had ridden herd for Bookie before the old ranch had been turned over to dudes. John Houghton had purloined a brood mare, three cows and a bull from Bookie thirty years before and had thus gotten a start in life. Fred had told this to Hugh in the month just passed. And there was not a man among them who had not visited the wise old man who had dreamed dreams in The Lariat.
Hugh told them about his discovery of the cave and of Bookie’s trip to his Christmas camp. With the accuracy of memory that was partly born in him and was partly the result of his scientific training he repeated the long conversation between himself and Bookie, appalled as he did so by the sudden revelation to himself of his own egoism. When he told of his findings in the cave and of Jimmie Duncan’s skeleton there was a sudden movement and murmur from his hearers. Hugh paused. He was not sure how far to go.
“What did you do with him?” demanded Whitson. “I knew that fellow.”
With sudden inspiration, Hugh decided to have no reticences. “What I say will be treated as entirely confidential and not even be inscribed on the minutes?” he asked.
Old Whitson turned to the young woman who was busily inscribing pot hooks in a notebook.
“Miss Dick, skeedaddle!” he said, shortly.
Miss Dick left the room with the nonchalant air of doing exactly what she had intended to do anyhow.
“Now, Stewart, shoot and shoot straight,” said the chairman. “We’ll have some straight man’s talk at this session. If any of you old timers want to get out, get out now, because I don’t opine I want to be interrupted while I’m digging up these three several kinds of old bones!”
A grin went round the table, but nobody moved except to relight cigars.