Dragons Teeth Crichton 2017 (WWT)

they reach us.”
“You boys go right ahead,” Cookie said. He was mounted on Toad’s horse, and leading my own.
I looked at Little Wind, but he would not meet my eyes. He shook his head. “Bad day now. Many
Sioux warriors in Sitting Bull camp. Kill all Crows. Kill all white men.”
“You heard the man,” Cookie said. “Me, I value my scalp. See you, boys. Come on, Little Wind.” And
he started to ride off to the north. A moment later, Little Wind wheeled his horse around and rode off
with him.
Toad and I stood by the wagon and watched them leave.
“They planned this,” Toad said. He shook his fist at them as they disappeared toward the horizon.
“Bastards! Bastards!”
As for me, my good spirits evaporated. I suddenly realized our predicament—we were two boys alone
on the vast and empty plains of the West. “What do we do now?”
Toad was still angry. “Cope paid them in advance, otherwise they would never dare to do this.”
“I know,” I said, “but what are we going to do now?”
Toad squinted at the lines of smoke to the south. “Do you really think those camps are a day away?”
“How would I know?” I cried. “I just said that so they wouldn’t leave.”
“Because the thing about Indians is,” Toad said, “that when they have a large camp, like Sitting
Bull’s, they keep hunting and raiding parties out in front of the main camp.”
“How far out in front?” I asked.
“Sometimes one, two days.”
We both stared at the fires again. “I make it six fires, maybe seven,” Toad said. “So that can’t be the
main camp. The main camp’d have hundreds of fires.”
I made up my own mind. I was not going to return to Cow Island without the fossils. I could not face
the Professor. “We have to get the fossils,” I said.
“Right,” Toad said.
We climbed aboard the wagon and headed west. I had never driven a wagon before, but I made a
tolerable job of it. Beside me, Toad whistled nervously. “Let’s sing a song,” he suggested.
“Let’s not,” I said. And so we drove in silence, with our hearts in our mouths.
They got lost.
Their own trail from the day before should have been easy enough to follow, but large stretches of
the plains were as flat and featureless as any ocean, and they lost their way several times.
They expected to reach the plains camp before noon, but instead finally found the camp in late
afternoon. They loaded the wagon with the remaining ten wooden crates of fossils, which weighed
about a thousand pounds in all, plus some final supplies and Johnson’s photographic equipment. He
was pleased they had come back, for among the fossils they now packed was of course the box with
the X, containing the precious Brontosaurus teeth. “Couldn’t go home without these,” he said.
But by the time they were ready to head back, it was after four o’clock, and growing dark.
They were pretty sure they could never find their way to Cow Island in darkness. That meant they
would have to spend the night on the plains—and in another day, the advancing Sioux might come
upon them. They were debating just what to do when they heard the savage, bloodcurdling cries of
Indians.
“Oh my God,” Toad said.
A dust cloud, stirred up by many riders, appeared on the eastern horizon. It was coming toward
them.
They scrambled aboard the wagon. Toad broke out the rifles and loaded them.
“How much ammunition have we got?” Johnson asked.
“Not enough,” Toad said. His hands were shaking, dropping shells.
The whooping grew louder. They could see a single rider, hunched low in the saddle, pursued by a