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Minnesota and Illinois. I know what I think. Six months from now I want to know what you think.”
    I had one final question, and this would prove the depth of her investigation. “Have you done any work on the reports of Maxwell Mercy?”
    She burst into laughter and astonished me by rising and kissing me on the cheek. “You’re a real dear,” she said. “I did my master’s thesis under Allan Nevins at Columbia on some unpublished letters I’d found of Captain Mercy. On my bedroom wall at home I have an old photograph of him taken by Jackson at Fort Laramie, and for your personal information I got damned near straight A’s at Illinois and honors at the University of Chicago, where I took my doctorate.”
    “Then what in hell are you doing knocking around with Cisco Calendar till four o’clock this morning?”
    “Because he sends me, you old prude. He sends me.”
    Next morning I drove her to Denver, where she caught the plane back to New York. At the ramp she told me, “Stay the rest of the week. You’ll fall in love with this place. I did.” When I wished her luck at the office, she said, “I’ll be working on maps.” Then, impulsively, she grabbed my hands. “We really need you ... to make the thing hum. Call us Friday night, saying you’re signing on.”
    I drove back by way of the university at Boulder because I wanted to consult my old friend, Gerald Lambrook of their history department, and he said, “I can’t see any pitfalls in the arrangement, Lewis. Granted, you’re not writing the article and you lose some control, but they’re a good outfit and if they say they’re going to give it first-class presentation, they will. What it amounts to, they’re paying you to do your own basic research.”
    Lambrook was an old-style professor, with a book-lined study, sheaves of term papers, which he still insisted on, and even a tweed jacket and a pipe. I worked in a turtleneck and it was sort of nice to know that the old Columbia-Minnesota-Stanford types were around. I had known him at Minnesota and it was easy to renew our old friendship.
    “But I’m interested, historically speaking,” he said, “in the fact that you haven’t mentioned the thing for which Centennial is most famous. The area; I mean.”
    I asked him what that was, and he said, “The old Zendt place.”
    “I know about it. Saw it yesterday. The fellow from Pennsylvania who wouldn’t build a fort but did build a farm.”
    “I don’t mean the farm. I mean Chalk Cliff, on his first place.”
    “Never heard of it.”
    “That’s where the first American dinosaur was found.”
    “The hell it was!”
    “That great big one. Went to Berlin and how we wish we had it back. And then, not far from there, but still on the original farm, the Clovis-point dig. Say, if you’re free, I think I could get one of the young fellows from geology to run us up there.” He started making phone calls, between which he told me, “The university’s doing some work up there, I think.” Finally he located an instructor who was taking his students on a field trip to the Zendt dig during the coming week, and he said he’d enjoy refreshing his memory, so off we went, Lambrook and I in my car and young Dr. Elmo Kennedy in his.
    We drove north along the foothills of the Rockies, past Estes Park on the west and Fort Collins on the east, till we came to what might have been called badlands. Dr. Kennedy pulled up to inform me, “We’re now entering the historic Venneford spread, and Chalk Cliff lies just ahead. I’ll open the gates, you close them.”
    We proceeded through three barbed-wire fences behind which white-faced Herefords grazed, and came at last to an imposing cliff, running north and south, forty feet high and chalky white. “Part of an old fault,” Kennedy explained. “Pennsylvanian period, if you’re interested. At the foot of the cliff, in 1875, down here in the Morrisonian Formation, Professor Wright of Harvard dug out the great