Water is a great solvent: earthquakes break the crust, and there you are!" "Then, before the earthquakes, the Salt Lakes were fresh ?" rejoined the hammock.
"There was fresh water west of the Rockies and south of---- Why," cried the professor, interrupting himself, "when I was in Wyoming and around there, this spring, in what they call the Bad Lands,--cliffs and buttes of indurated yellow clay and sandstone, worn and carved out by floods long before the Aztecs started to move out of Canada,--I saw fossil bones sticking out of the cliffs, the least of which would make the fortune of a museum.

That was between the Rockies and the Wahsatch." "People's bones ?" asked the hammock, agitating itself again, and showing a glimpse of a smooth throat and a slender ankle.
"Bless my soul! If there were people in those days they must have had an anxious time of it!" returned the sage.

"No, no, my dear.

There was brontosaurus, and atlantosaurus, and hydrosaurus, and iguanodon,--lizards, you know, not like these little black fellows that run about in the pulverized feldspar here, but chaps eighty or a hundred feet long, and twenty or thirty high; and turtles, as big as a house." "How did they get there ?" "Got mired while they were feeding, perhaps; or the water drained off and left them high and dry." "But where did the water go to ?" The general chuckled at this juncture, and lit another cigar.

"She knows more questions than you do the answers to them," quoth he.