He found Emily in the lobby of the Inter-Ocean Hotel. She was drinking wine.
“Where are my crates?”
“I have nothing to say to you.”
“What have you done with my crates, Emily?”
“Nothing.” She shook her head. “They are just old bones. Nobody wants ’em.”
Relieved, Johnson collapsed in a chair beside her.
“I can’t see why they are so important to you,” she said.
“They are, that’s all.”
“Well, I hope you got some money because the hotel is asking for the bill and my smiling at the desk man is wearing thin.”
“I have money. My father sent—”
She wasn’t listening, however, but staring across the room past him. Her eyes lit up: “Collis!”
Johnson turned to look. Behind him, a heavyset, dour man in a dark suit was checking into the hotel at the front desk. The man looked over. He had the mournful expression of a basset hound. “Miranda? Miranda Lapham?”
Johnson frowned. “Miranda?”
Emily was standing, beaming. “Collis Huntington, whatever are you doing in Cheyenne?”
“Bless me, it’s Miranda Lapham!”
“Miranda? Lapham?” Johnson said, not only confused by Emily’s new name but by the sudden idea that he might not have known her real identity at all. And why had she lied to him?
The heavyset man embraced Emily with warm and lingering familiarity. “Why, Miranda, you look wonderful, simply wonderful.”
“It’s delightful to see you, Collis.”
“Let me look at you,” he said, stepping back, beaming. “You haven’t changed a bit, Miranda. I don’t mind telling you I’ve missed you, Miranda.”
“And I you, Collis.”
The heavy man turned to Johnson. “This beautiful young lady is the best lobbyist the railroads ever had in Washington.”
Johnson said nothing. He was still trying to put it together. Collis Huntington, Washington, railroads . . . My God—Collis Huntington! One of the Big Four of the Central Pacific in California. Collis Huntington, the blatant corruptionist who traveled each year to Washington with a suitcase full of money for the congressmen, the man once described as “scrupulously dishonest.”
“Everyone misses you, Miranda,” Huntington went on. “They all ask for you still. Bob Arthur—”
“Dear Senator Arthur—”
“And Jack Kearns—”
“Commissioner Kearns, what a dear man—”
“And even the general—”
“The general? He still asks for me?”
“He does,” Huntington said sadly, shaking his head. “Why don’t you come back, Miranda? Washington was always your first love.”
“All right,” she said suddenly. “You’ve convinced me.”
Huntington turned to Johnson. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your companion?”
“He’s nobody,” Miranda Lapham said, shaking her head so her curls moved prettily. She took Huntington’s arm. “Come, Collis, we’ll have a delicious lunch and you can tell me the news of Washington. And there is so much to do, you will have to find me a house, of course, and I will need some setting up . . .”
They moved away, arm in arm, to the dining room.
Johnson sat there, stunned.
At eight the next morning, feeling he had lived a decade in a few months, he took the Union Pacific train east, all ten crates stored in the rattling luggage car. The monotony of the voyage was most enjoyable, and he marked the greening of the landscape. The arrival of autumn could be seen in the top leaves of the oaks and maples and apple trees. At each stop, he would get off and buy the local newspapers, noticing an Eastern point of view creeping into the editorials about the Indian Wars—and various other topics.
On the morning of the fourth day, in Pittsburgh, he telegraphed Cope to say he had survived and would like to come speak with him; he said nothing about the crates of bones. Then he telegraphed his parents and asked that they have an extra place set for dinner that night.
He arrived in Philadelphia on October 8.
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.”
His father embraced him warmly. “I thank God for your return, son.”
His mother stood at the top of the stairs and said weepily, “The beard makes you look frightfully common, William. Get rid of it at once.”
“What’s happened to your lip?” his father said. “Are you wounded?”
“Indians,” Johnson said.
“Looks like teeth marks to me,” Edward, his brother, said.
“That’s so,” Johnson said. “This Indian climbed aboard the wagon and bit me. Wanted to see what I would taste like.”
“Bit you on the lip? What, was he trying to kiss you?”
“They are savages,” Johnson said. “And unpredictable.”