“Kissed by an Indian!” Edward said, clapping his hands. “Kissed by an Indian!”
Johnson rolled up his trousers and showed everyone the scar where the arrow had pierced his leg. He produced the stump of the arrow. He chose not to tell them many details, and said nothing of Emily Williams or Miranda Lapham or whatever her true name was. He did tell them about burying Toad and Little Wind.
Edward burst into tears and ran upstairs to his room.
“We’re just glad to have you back, son,” his father said, looking suddenly much older.
The fall term was already under way, but the dean of Yale College permitted him to enroll anyway. Johnson was not above the dramatic effect of putting on his Western clothes and his gun and striding into the dining room.
The entire room fell silent. Then someone said, “It’s Johnson! Willy Johnson!”
Johnson strode over to Marlin’s table. Marlin was eating with friends.
“I believe you owe me money,” Johnson said, in his best tough voice.
“How colorful you look,” Marlin said, laughing. “You must introduce me to your tailor, William.”
Johnson said nothing.
“Should I presume you had many dime Western adventures and killed men in actual gunfights?” Marlin said, hamming it up for their listeners.
“Yes,” Johnson said. “That would be correct.”
Marlin’s antic smile dropped, unsure of Johnson’s meaning.
“I believe you owe me money,” Johnson said again.
“My dear fellow, I owe you nothing at all! If you remember, the terms of our bet were that you would accompany Professor Marsh, and the entire school knows you did not get far with him before he cast you aside as a rogue and scoundrel.”
In a single swift movement, Johnson grabbed Marlin by the collar, effortlessly hoisted him to his feet, and slammed him against the wall. “You snotty little bastard, you give me that thousand dollars or I’ll break your head open.”
Marlin was gasping, and noticed Johnson’s scar. “I don’t know you.”
“No, but you owe me. Now tell everybody what you are going to do.”
“I’m going to pay you a thousand dollars.”
“Louder.”
Marlin repeated it loudly. The room laughed. Johnson dropped him in a crumpled heap to the floor and walked out of the dining room.
Othniel Marsh lived alone in a mansion he had built on a hill outside New Haven. As he walked up the hill, Johnson had a sense of the loneliness and isolation of Marsh’s life, his need for approval, for status and acceptance. He was shown to the drawing room; Marsh was working there alone, and looked up from a manuscript he was preparing.
“You sent for me, Professor Marsh?”
Marsh glared at him. “Where are they?”
“You mean the bones?”
“Of course I mean the bones! Where are they?”
Johnson held Marsh’s gaze. He realized he was no longer afraid of the man, in any way. “Professor Cope has the bones, in Philadelphia. All of them.”
“Is it true you have found the remains of a hitherto unknown dinosaur of great size?”
“I am not at liberty to say, Professor.”
“You are a fatuous fool,” Marsh said. “You have squandered your own opportunity for greatness. Cope will never publish, and if he does, his report will be so hasty, so filled with inaccuracies, that it will never attain the recognition of the scientific community. You should have brought them to Yale, where they could be properly studied. You are a fool and a traitor to your college, Johnson.”
“Is that all, Professor?”
“Yes, that’s all.” Johnson turned to leave. “One more thing,” Marsh said.
“Yes, Professor?”
“I don’t suppose you can get the bones back?”
“No, Professor.”
“Then it’s gone,” Marsh said wistfully. “All gone.” He returned to his manuscript. His pen scratched on the paper.
Johnson left the room. On his way out, he passed a small skeleton of the miniature Cretaceous horse Eohippus. It was beautifully formed, beautifully assembled, this pale skeleton from the distant past. Somehow it made Johnson sad. He turned away, and hurried down the hill toward the College.
Postscript
Cope
Edward Drinker Cope died penniless in 1897 in Philadelphia, having exhausted his family fortune and his energy battling Marsh.
He was relatively young still, only fifty-six years old. But he had seen the first Brontosaurus skeleton assembled at the Yale Peabody Museum and more than fourteen hundred papers published. He is credited with the discovery
and naming of more than one thousand vertebrate species and more than fifty kinds of dinosaurs. One, Anisonchus cophater, he said he named “in honor of the number of Cope haters who surround me!” He donated his body to science and instructed
that after death his brain size be compared with Marsh’s, it being commonly believed at the time that brain size determined
intelligence. Marsh declined to accept the challenge.
Marsh
Othniel Charles Marsh died two years after Cope, alone and embittered in the house he had built for himself. He was buried
in the Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut. He and his fossil hunters discovered five-hundred-odd different fossilized
animals, including some eighty dinosaurs; he named them all himself.
Earp
Wyatt Earp died on January 13, 1929, in a rented bungalow near the intersection of Venice and Crenshaw Boulevards in Los Angeles,
after acting in silent movies and then selling the rights to his life story to Columbia Pictures. In later years he was strongly
influenced by the wishes of his wife, Josie. He told his life story as he remembered it, or chose to remember it, to Stuart
N. Lake, a Pasadena writer, two years before his death. When published as Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal, it made a terrific impression, and established his fame enduringly.
Sternberg
Charles Hazelius Sternberg became a celebrated American fossil collector and amateur paleontologist who wrote about his time
with Cope. He was in fact working for Cope when Cope died, and learned of his death three days later, wired directly by his
wife. Sternberg wrote two books: The Life of a Fossil Hunter (1909) and Hunting Dinosaurs in the Badlands of the Red Deer River, Alberta, Canada (1917). He was responsible for finding the Monoclonius, or, as it is commonly known, the horned dinosaur. He quoted Cope as saying, “No man can say he loves us, when he wantonly
destroys our work; no man loves God who wantonly destroys his creatures.” Fossils collected by Sternberg are displayed in
museums around the world.
Author’s Note
“Biography,” observed Oscar Wilde, “lends to death a new terror.” Even in a work of fiction about individuals long dead, there is reason to consider his sentiment.