Dragons Teeth Crichton 2017 (WWT)

They rode on.
The sun dropped behind the peaks of the Rockies, and still they rode. Johnson began to worry. He
had never been out on the plains at night before, and Cope had repeatedly warned him always to
return to camp before dark.
“How much farther?”
“Soon.”
They rode for perhaps fifteen minutes more and stopped again. Little Wind seemed to be stopping
more often. Johnson thought it was because it was too dark to see the ground clearly.
“How much farther?”
“You want go back?”
“Me? No, I was just asking how much farther.”
Little Wind smiled. “Get dark, you afraid.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I was just asking. Is it much farther, do you think?”
“No,” Little Wind said. He pointed. “There.”
Beyond a far ridge, they saw a thin line of gray smoke climbing straight into the sky. A campfire.
“Leave horses,” Little Wind said, dismounting. He pulled up a bunch of grass, let the blades fall in
the wind. They drifted south. Little Wind nodded, and explained that they must approach the camp
downwind or the other men’s horses would smell them.
They crept forward, over the next ridge, lay on their stomachs, and looked down into the valley
below.
In the deepening twilight, two men, a tent, a glowing fire. Six horses picketed behind the tent. One of
the men was stocky, the other tall. They were cooking an antelope they had killed. Johnson could not
see their faces well.
But he found the sight of this solitary camp, surrounded in all directions by miles of open plains,
oddly disturbing. Why were they here?
“These men want bones,” Little Wind said, echoing his own thoughts.
And then the tall man leaned close to the fire as he adjusted the leg on the spit, and Johnson saw a
face he knew. It was the tough man he had spoken to in the Omaha train station. The man Marsh had
spoken to near the cornfields. Navy Joe Benedict.
And then they heard a murmuring voice. The tent flap opened, and a balding, heavyset man
emerged. He was rubbing something in his hands—spectacles he was cleaning. The man spoke again,
and even from a distance Johnson recognized the slight halt, the formality of the speech.
It was Marsh.
Cope clapped his hands in delight. “So! The learned professor of Copeology has followed us here!
What better proof of what I have been saying? The man is not a scientist—he is a dog in the manger.
He does not pursue his own discoveries—he seeks to spy on mine. I have neither time nor inclination
to spy on him. But Daddy Marsh can come all the way from Yale College to the Territory of Montana
just to keep track of me!” He shook his head. “The asylum will yet receive him.”
“You seem amused, Professor,” Johnson said.
“Of course I am amused! Not only is my theory of the man’s dementia amply confirmed—but so
long as he is tracking me, he cannot be finding any new bones of his own!”