He skirted the sandstone butte, looking for a way up. The view was incredible, but from the top he would be able to see even more. He edged along a sandstone ledge no more than three feet wide, plunging a thousand feet down into the blue depths of a canyon. He had never been this deep into the high mesa country before, and he felt like an explorer, a John "Wesley Powell. This was, without a doubt, some of the remotest country that existed in the lower forty-eight.
He came around the edge and stopped in surprise and delighted astonishment. There, wedged into the side of the bluff, was a tiny but almost perfect Anasazi cliff dwelling-four small rooms constructed from stacked pieces of sandstone and mortared with mud.
He edged around the precipice with great care-how in the world had they raised children here?-and knelt down, peering in the doorway. The tiny room inside was empty, save for a scattering of burned corn cobs and a few potsherds. A single shaft of sunlight penetrating through a broken part of the wall, splashing a brilliant splotch of light on the ground. There were recent footprints in the dust of the floor made by someone wearing hiking boots
with chevron-shaped lugs, and Ford wondered if these belonged to the prospector. It seemed likely; if you were going to search this corner of the high mesas, you couldn't find a better lookout.
He stood up and continued along the ledge past the ruin, where he encountered an ancient hand-and-foot trail pecked into the sloping sandstone, going to the top of the butte.
The summit afforded a dazzling vista across the Echo Badlands, almost, it seemed, to the very curve of the earth itself. To his left, the enormous profile of Mesa de los Viejos loomed up, level after level like a great stone staircase, rising to the foothills of the Canjilon Mountains. It was one of the most awesome views it had ever been his privilege to see, as if the Great Creator had blown up and burned the landscape, leaving it an utter wreck.
Ford sorted through his maps and removed one. He traced the quadrants of the map with his eye and then mentally drew those same lines on the badlands in front of him. Having sectioned and numbered the landscape to his satisfaction, he took out his binoculars and began searching the first quadrant, the one farthest to the east. When that was done he moved on to the next one and the next, methodically working his way across the landscape, looking for the peculiar rock formation outlined in the computer plot.
His first sweep yielded too many candidates. Similar formations were often found in groups, having been carved from the same layers of stone by the same action of wind and water. Ford had a growing conviction that he was on the right track, that the T. Rex was somewhere in the Echo Badlands. He just needed to get closer.
He spent the next fifteen minutes examining each quadrant a second time, but while many rock formations looked similar to the one he was after, none were a perfect match.
There was always the possibility, of course, that he was looking at the right formation from the wrong angle, or that the formation might be hidden in one of the deep canyons at the far end of the badlands. As his eyes roved about, one canyon in particular captured his attention. Tyrannosaur Canyon. It was the longest canyon in the high mesas, deep and tortuous, cutting more than twenty miles across the Echo Badlands, with hundreds, maybe even thousands, of side canyons and tributaries. He identified the great basalt monolith that marked its opening, and he followed its sinuous length with his binoculars.
Deep in the badlands, the canyon petered out in a distant valley jammed with queer, domelike rocks. Some of the domes looked uncannily like the image in the computer plot-broader on top, with narrower necks. They were jumbled together like a crowd of bald men knocking their heads together.
Ford measured the distance from the sun to the horizon with his fingers at arm's length, and decided it was about four o'clock. Being June, the sun wouldn't set until well past eight. If he hustled, he could reach the cluster of sandstone domes before dark. It didn't look like there would be any water down there, but he had recently filled his two canteens at a fast-evaporating pothole left from the recent heavy rain, giving him four liters in reserve. He would camp somewhere down in that impressive canyon, commence his exploration at the crack of dawn tomorrow. Sunday. The day of the Lord.
He pushed that thought out of his mind.
Ford took one last look through his binoculars at the deep, mysterious canyon.
Something twisted in his gut. He knew the T. Rex. was down there-in Tyrannosaur Canyon.
The irony of it made Ford smile.
15
HARRY DEARBORN DREW in a long breath of air, his face hidden in shadow. "My goodness, it's four-thirty already. Would you care for tea?"
"If it isn't too much trouble," Tom said, wondering how the enormously fat man would get out of his chair, let alone make tea.
"Not at all." Dearborn moved his foot slightly and pressed a small bump in the floor; a moment later the dim presence of a servant materialized out of the back of the house.
"Tea."
The man withdrew.
"Now where were we? Ah, yes, Stem Weathers's daughter. Roberta's her name."
"Robbie."
"Robbie, that's what her father called her. Unfortunately, she and her father were somewhat estranged. Last I heard she was trying to make it as an artist in Texas-Marfa, I believe. Down there by the Big Bend. A small town-she should be easy to find."
"How did you know Weathers? Did he collect dinosaurs for you?"
A fat finger tapped on the arm of his chair. "Nobody collects for me, Thomas, although I might pass on suggestions from some of my clients. I have nothing to do with the collecting-beyond requiring documentary proof that the fossil came from private land."
Here, Dearborn paused long enough for an ironic smile to stretch across the lower part of his face. Then he continued.
"Most of the fossil hunters out there are looking for small stuff. I call them the ferns and fishes crowd, like our Mr. Beezon. Crap by the truckload. Once in a. while they stumble over something important and that's when they come to me.
I have clients who are looking for somerhing quite particular: businessmen, foreign museums, collectors. I match buyers and sellers and take a twenty percent commission. I
never see or touch the specimens. I am not a field man."
Tom stifled a smile.
The servant appeared with an enormous silver tray carrying a pot of tea covered in a quilted cozy, plates heaped with scones, cream puffs, small eclairs, and miniature brioches, jars of marmalade, butter, clotted cream, and honey. He placed the tray on a table to the side of Dearborn and vanished as silently as he had come.
"Excellent!" Dearborn pulled the cozy off the pot, filled two china cups, added milk and sugar.
"Your tea." He handed the cup and saucer to Tom.
Tom took his cup, sipped.
"I insist on my tea being prepared English style, not as the barbaric Americans make it."
He chuckled and drained his cup in a single smooth motion, placed it down empty, and then reached out with a plump hand and plucked a brioche from the tray, opened it steaming, slathered it in clotted cream, and popped it in his mouth. He next took a hot crumpet, placed a soft dollop of butter on top, and waited for it to melt before eating it.
"Please, help yourself," he said in a muffled voice.
Tom took an eclair and bit into it. Thick whipped cream squirted out the back and dribbled down his hand. He ate it, licking up the cream and wiping off his hand.
Dearborn smacked his lips, dabbed them with a napkin, and went on. "Stem Weathers wasn't a ferns and fishes man. He was after unique specimens. He spent his whole life looking for that one big strike. Big-time dinosaur hunters are all of a type. They're not in it for money. They're obsessed. It's the excitement of the hunt, the thrill of the strike, an obsession with finding something of enormous rarity and value-that's what keeps them going."