Читать книгу A West Point Treasure; Or, Mark Mallory's Strange Find онлайн

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Here Mark paused for breath, and began to laugh.

“What did Dewey say?” inquired Grace.

“He wanted to know if the Parson would classify the summer girl as a bird. He said he’d seen lots of their tracks on the beach. Then he wanted to know if a learned geologist could tell the track of a Chicago girl from that of a Boston girl. Then he went on to imagine the contents of a Coney Island sandstone. The Parson had told of Megatheriums’ bones and teeth and skeletons. Dewey wanted to know how about empty sarsaparilla bottles and peanut shells, and tickets to the Turkish dancers and Shoot the Chutes, and popcorn balls, and frankfurters.”

“What did the Parson say?” laughed the girl.

“Oh, he just said something about being ‘frivolous.’ But the climax came a few minutes later when the Parson told how Cavier and other famous scientists had become so wondrously learned that they could tell what an animal was from the tiniest bit of its skeleton, its frame, as he called it. And that started Dewey. He put on his most serious face and told us how he’d read of a great mystery, a geologist who had found the frame of an animal hard as iron, and almost smashed to pieces in some rocks. There was what looked like the body of a man lying near. The first-mentioned thing, so Dewey said, had eighteen teeth in front and seven behind. And the geologist didn’t know what on earth it was.”