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dinosaur that can be seen in Berlin.”
    “I never knew that,” I confessed. “I knew the dinosaur but not its provenance.”
    “And two miles up, at the other end of the cliff, is where they found—1935, I think it was—that excellent site with the Clovis points.”
    “I have heard about that,” I said, “but not that it was located near Chalk Cliff.”
    We spent the rest of the morning there, inspecting this historic site, after which Lambrook and Kennedy drove back to Boulder. “Be sure to close the gates,” they warned. That left me some time to inspect the brooding cliff, and as I kicked at the chalky limestone I came upon a fossilized sea shell, a frail, delicate thing now transformed into stone, indubitable proof that this cliff and the land around it had once lain at the bottom of some sea and now stood over five thousand feet above sea level. I tried to visualize the titanic force that must have been involved in such a rearrangement of the earth’s surface, and I think it was then I began to see my little object-town Centennial in a rather larger dimension than the editors back in New York saw it.
    By back roads I drove east to Line Camp, seeing that desolate spot from a new angle, and was even more fascinated by the compression of history one observed there: Indian campground, cattle station, sheep ranch, dry-land farming, dust bowl, and then abandonment as a site no longer fit for human concern. The place attracted me like a magnet and I wished that I were writing of it and not Centennial, which at this point seemed pretty ordinary to me, but as I drove south, it occurred to me that I must be following the old Skimmerhorn Trail, and when I came to the low bluffs that marked the delineation between the river bottom and the prairie and I was able to look down into Centennial and its paltry railroad, with cottonwoods outlining the south side of the Platte, I had a suspicion that perhaps it too had had its moments of historic significance. What they were, I could not anticipate, but if I took the job I would soon find out.
    I Was eating lunch at Flor de Méjico—sandwiches, not enchiladas—when I heard a man’s voice inquiring, “Manolo, you have a man from Georgia eating here?” Marquez replied, “Right over here, Paul,” and he brought a tall, well-dressed rancher-type to my table.
    “I’m Paul Garrett,” he said, extending his hand. “Mind if I sit down?”
    I asked him to do so, and he said, “Heard you were in town. When Miss Endermann was here before we did a lot of work together. And I wondered if you’d like to take a little orientation spin in my plane.”
    “Very much!” I said. “I understand things better when I see the geographical layout. But I’m leaving Friday.”
    “I meant right now.”
    “I’m free.”
    He drove me out to an airstrip east of Beaver Creek, where his pilot waited with a six-seater Beechcraft, and we piled in. Within minutes we were high over the Platte, and for the first time I saw the meanders of this incredible river from aloft. “The braided river,” one expert had called it with justification, for the strands of the river were so numerous and the islands so interspersed, it did seem as if giant hands had braided the river so it now hung like a lovely pigtail from the head of the mountains.
    Several times we flew up and down the Platte, and I appreciated better how it dominated the area, where it overflowed its banks, where it deposited huge thicknesses of gravel, and how men had siphoned off much of its water into irrigation ditches. It became an intricate system rather than an isolated ditch.
    Garrett then directed the pilot to fly north to the Wyoming line, and as we left the river and crossed the arid plains, coming at last to bluffs which marked the end of Colorado in that direction, he told me, “This is the old Venneford spread. I want you to see it, because you won’t believe it” He asked the pilot to fly west toward the mountains, and