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THE AGED BUICK droned across the endless expanse ofwest Texas. The pace ofthe last few days had left me with numbed nerves, and I guided the car toward the ever-receding horizon in sort of a trance. Late Tuesday afternoon the wheels rolled me into Marathon. At the Gage Hotel I caught sight of Barnum coming down the front steps, dark as an Indian from his weeks in the desert sun, in smiling good spirits. "You missed Erich by just a couple of hours, " he said. I drove the Buick into the hotel garage to put her in storage. The weeks of using her as a stonewagon in Glen Rose had brought her ever nearer to ultimate collapse, and I backed her in tenderly; if I bumped the wall, she might well settle down dust unto dust like the "Wonderful One-Hoss Shay." Walking away from her, I looked back only once; I had a premonition we'd never meet again. The Ford truck outside was covered with dust. It, too, had seen heavy duty of late, but the body and frame under the brown film looked sound and reliable. Loaded in back were all the accoutrements ofovernight camping: a mess box, a (;:ouple of cots, bed rolls, a large canvas tarp. Also the usual fossildigging tools, bags of plaster, and a bale of burlap sacks. A drum of gasoline. Two empty drums, and three milk cans. Brown appeared around the corner pulling a garden hose. "We'll need our own water in the Big Bend," he said. "Stick this nozzle into one of those empty drums, and we'll see what happens." When we had filled the drums and the milk cans we drove around to Marathon's grocery store to stock up. By nightfall we were ready for the road again; Barnum wanted to make an early start. By eight o'clock we had bumped across the Southern Pacific tracks and were headed south. It was good to be back behind the wheel and headed somewhere on purpose. The gravel road pointed toward an empty desert and distant peaks. It climbed a bit and snaked its way through low hills with limestone ledges covered sparsely with nondescript brush. The light grey rocks were Paleozoic in age; no dinosaurs. We eased up the slopes of the Santiagos, and from their top we could see the distant Chisos off in the Big Bend country. The horizon had moved back in all directions. "The Lord had batter to spare when he laid out this country," Brown remarked. The formations in which he and Erich had worked were Upper Cretaceous. When we came upon the first outcrop, rising with the uplift of the Chisos, Brown pointed out a low series of sequestra not unlike some of the upper Mesaverde close to Rock Springs. "Those are the Aguja beds, with the Tornilla Formation above them, in the distance," he added. Bands of blue and purple clays, with interbedded grey sandstones, lay above the rolling brown sequestra. So far most of their fmds, Brown said, had been in the Aguja. "The bones we've found have been scattered, often broken, but the exposures are good and easily checked out." I listened again to the story of finding the big crocodile and was sorry I had missed out on it. Noon came, and we had lunch at the end of a small side road, where Brown told me he and Erich had set up a tent, and where Erich had caught a rattlesnake . We lingered at this base camp only long enough to pick up more equipment, then swung east, into the country drained by the Tornilla Wash. The terrain dropped toward the Rio Grande Valley, and the road grew rougher. Except for a narrow band of brush along the washes, vegetation was thin and sparse and only emphasized the lack of cover from the glare of the afternoon sun. Near evening the trail led into low hills and crossed a long, flat bed of sand that was the Tornilla Wash. The sun set behind the Chisos, and night came on quickly. The bumpy road became a deserted trail that turned and plunged into a tangle of brush in the dark. Brown directed me down a little draw with no sign of wheel tracks ahead. The headlights bored into the rising flank of a soft clay hill. "Let's look this thing over afoot," he suggested. I stopped the truck. We seemed to be on...

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