Dragons Teeth Crichton 2017 (WWT)

Four Meetings
At the train station, Johnson hired a man with an empty greengrocer’s wagon to take him to Cope’s
house on Pine Street in Philadelphia. It wasn’t a long trip, and he arrived to find that Cope owned two
matching three-story stone row houses, one a residence and the other a private museum and offices.
Most surprising was that Cope lived perhaps only seven or eight blocks from Rittenhouse Square,
where Johnson’s mother was even now preparing for his arrival.
“Which house is the residence?” he asked the wagon owner.
“I do not know, but I think that fellow will tell you,” the man said, pointing.
It was Cope himself, bouncing down the steps. “Johnson!”
“Professor!”
He gave Johnson a firm handshake and a decisively strong hug.
“You’re alive and—” He spied the tarp over the back of the wagon. “Is it possible?”
Johnson nodded. “It wasn’t impossible, is perhaps my best answer.”
The crates were taken directly into the museum half of Cope’s property. Mrs. Cope came in with
lemonade and wafers, and they sat down; they oohed over his stories, fussed over his appearance,
exclaimed over his crates of bones.
“I will want to have a secretary transcribe an entire account of your adventure,” said Cope. “We
need to be able to prove that the bones we excavated in Montana are the bones that sit now in
Philadelphia.”
“A few may have broken from the way the wagon and stages bounced around,” Johnson said. “Plus
there may be a few bullet holes or bone chips, but mostly they’re all here.”
“The Brontosaurus teeth?” Cope asked, his hands twitching in excitement. “Do you still have the
teeth? It may not reflect well on me, but I have been worrying about this since the day we thought you
had been killed.”
“It’s this crate here, Professor,” Johnson said, finding the box with the X.
Cope unpacked it on the spot, lifted the teeth one by one, and stared at them for a very long time,
transfixed. He set them down in a row, much as he had done on the shale cliff many weeks earlier,
nearly two thousand miles to the west. “This is extraordinary,” he said. “Quite extraordinary. Marsh
will be hard put to match it for many years.”
“Edward,” said Mrs. Cope, “hadn’t we better send Mr. Johnson home to his family?”
“Yes, of course,” Cope said. “They must be eager to see you.”