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I T'S A GOOD THING I934 came around only once in my lifetime; I couldn't have taken it twice. I began it as a wandering motorcycle cowboy, looking for almost anything to happen . And it had happened in spades ... and awls and prospecting picks and dust brushes ... on the most interesting job in the world. I was working with and for the top man in his field. And he was working on the biggest job of his life ... fifteen dinosaurs, more or less, in one fantastic graveyard . And it had all happened because a fossil I had stumbled over happened to be the first of its kind ever found. Added to an everything that needed no additions , the social side of the end of that one-of-akind summer outshone anything that happened along this line in my life. The Patons had urged us repeatedly to rally around their ranch for a weekend party. They brought around Mrs. Ewen from the Ewen ranch on the flats below Shell, who also urged us to pay them a visit of a weekend. And the Austins, who had a remarkable collection oflocal fossils of many types gathered over the years. We didn't start to cash in on these wonderful invitations until after Brown arrived ... and after The New York Times told the people of northern Wyoming what a wonderful fmd they had, with a few words on what an outstanding aggregation of scientists had rallied here to help them develop it. The social season opened with a party at the Frank Ewen ranch. It took two cars and a truck to get us there. After the ruggedness of the Howe place, the Ewen ranch was a million dollar movie set. It nestled in the center of a green carpet of alfalfa that sloped toward the snow-capped Big Horns. A row of cottonwoods graced the lawn. "This is really an honor," Mrs. Ewen beamed. 9 61 "You know, Dr. Brown, we were almost afraid to ask you and your eminent colleagues down to such a simple home affair." Looking over the assembled Ewens and our own sizable party, I was more worried about how they could ever fit us in. Mrs. Ewen flitted graciously among her guests, chatting a minute here, a moment there, with Brown, Green, Rainsford, giving each his title, awarding Lewis his 'doctorate' a few months early, conferring professorships on Carl and even on me. "Let's soak it up," I said to Carl. "It's only for a night. " As dark came on, somehow everyone found a chair in the crowded dining room. After a hard day's "prospecting," we were all hungry enough to put a damper on conversation until the meal was done. Afterward, Carl and I helped the girls wash up dishes in the roomy ranch kitchen; Carl was sure our lack of erudition and our phony upgrading stood less chance of being exposed there, and I felt the company of the girls a nice change from camp. By the time we were done, the party had wandered out to the pleasant porch, into the cool summer air. The porch lay in shadowy darkness, with dim backlighting from the lamps in the house. The thinnest of white light bounced from the glittering snows atop the Big Horns, sparkling down on us from the diamond-pointed stars. There was a bit of cricket music from the hedge, the soft scrape and shuffle and bustle of getting comfortably seated in comfortable chairs, and for a bit the pleasant insistence of Mrs. Ewen attempting to get Brown opened up for story-telling. Since we first had met, I had learned a good bit about this remarkable man, but when Mrs. Ewen got him going and he got his pipe properly stoked, I was amazed by a new and until now unrevealed facet. What a raconteur! No one measured the time we spent, following Brown in his long fossil-hunting trail around the world. Sometimes he stepped outside the realm of fossildom; there was a mysterious luminous giant spider that got away, in India. He took us through a shipwreck off Tierra del Fuego, a camel trip across the desert in Ethiopia, a trip through Greece for fossil mammals ... Crete ... the Mediterranean. Now and then a puff on his pipe lit up his face in the darkness. We finally stopped with a lion hunt in Patagonia. Brown was inside the cave, after the lion that had been...

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