Dragon Teeth Page 5

  And then she turned, and with complete naturalness kissed him on the mouth, right there in the warm Western darkness of Cheyenne, in a deep way he had never yet experienced. Johnson thought he would die with the pleasure of it all.

  “I love you, Lucienne,” he blurted. The words just came out, unbidden, unexpected. But it was the truth; he felt it through his whole body.

  She stroked his cheek. “You are a nice boy.”

  He did not know how long they stayed like that, facing each other in the dark. They kissed again, and a third time. He was breathless.

  “Shall we walk on?” he said finally.

  She shook her head. “You go on home now. Back to the hotel.”

  “I’d better see you to your door.”

  “No,” she said. “You have a train in the morning. You get your sleep.”

  He looked around at the street. “Are you sure you’ll be all right?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Promise?”

  She smiled. “Promise.”

  He walked a few steps toward his hotel, turned, and looked back.

  “Don’t worry about me,” she called, and blew him a kiss.

  He blew a kiss back to her and walked on. At the end of the block he looked back once again, but she was gone.

  At the hotel, the sleepy night clerk gave him his key. “Good evening, sir?” he asked.

  “Wonderful,” Johnson said. “Absolutely wonderful.”

  Morning in Cheyenne

  Johnson awoke at eight, refreshed and excited. He looked out his window at the flat expanse of Cheyenne, boxy buildings stretching across the plains. By all accounts it was a dreary sight, but Johnson found it beautiful. And the day was lovely, clear and warm, with the fluffy high clouds peculiar to the West.

  It was true that he would not see the beautiful Lucienne for many weeks until his return trip, but this fact added a delicious poignancy to his mood, and he was in excellent humor when he went downstairs to the dining room, where the Marsh party had been instructed to meet for breakfast, at nine.

  No one was there.

  A table had been set for a large group, but the dirty plates were being collected by a waiter.

  “Where is everybody?” Johnson asked.

  “Who do you mean?”

  “Professor Marsh and his students.”

  “They’re not here,” the waiter said.

  “Where are they?”

  “Gone an hour or more.”

  The words sank in slowly. “The professor and the students are gone?”

  “They went to catch the nine o’clock train.”

  “What nine o’clock train?”

  The waiter looked at Johnson irritably. “I have a lot to do,” he said, turning away, rattling the plates.

  Their bags and expedition equipment had been stored in a large room on the ground floor of the hotel, behind the reception desk. The bellboy unlocked the door: the room was empty except for the crates containing Johnson’s photographic equipment.

  “They’re gone!”

  “Something of yours missing?” the bellboy said.

  “No, not mine. But everyone else is gone.”

  “I just came on duty,” the bell captain said apologetically. He was a boy of sixteen. “Perhaps you should ask at the desk.”

  “Oh yes, Mr. Johnson,” said the man at the front desk. “Professor Marsh said not to wake you when they departed. He said you were leaving the expedition here in Cheyenne.”

  “He said what?”

  “That you were leaving the expedition.”

  Johnson felt panic. “Why would he say that?”

  “I really don’t know, sir.”

  “What am I going to do now?” Johnson asked aloud.

  The distress must have been apparent in his face and voice. The man at the front desk looked at him sympathetically.

  “They’re serving breakfast in the dining room for another half hour,” he suggested.

  He had no appetite, but he returned to the dining room and took a small table to one side. The waiter was still clearing dishes from the bare table; Johnson watched, imagining the group of Marsh and the students, imagining their excited voices, talking at once, ready to leave . . . Why had they left him behind? What possible reason could there be?

  The bellboy approached him. “Are you with the Marsh expedition?”

  “I am.”

  “The professor asked if he might join you for breakfast.”

  In an instant, Johnson realized that it was all a mistake after all, that the professor had not gone, the hotel staff had merely misunderstood, everything was going to be all right.

  With immense relief he said, “Of course he may join me.”

  A moment later, a clear, rather high voice said, “Mr. Johnson?”

  Johnson faced a man he had never seen before—a wiry, fair-haired man with a mustache and goatee stood next to his table. He was tall, in his middle thirties, and rather formally dressed in stiff collar and frock coat. Although his clothes were expensive and well cut, he nevertheless gave the impression of an energetic indifference, even sloppiness. His eyes were bright and lively. He appeared amused. “May I join you?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Don’t you know?” the man said, more amused than ever. He extended his hand. “I’m Professor Cope.” Johnson noticed that his grip was firm and confident, and his fingers stained with ink.

  Johnson stared, and leapt to his feet. Cope! Cope himself! Right here, in Cheyenne! Cope eased him back into his seat and beckoned to the waiter for coffee. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “I’m not the monster you have heard described. That particular monster exists only in the diseased imagination of Mr. Marsh. Yet another of his descriptions of nature is in error. You must have observed that the man is as paranoid and secretive as he is fat, and always imagines the worst in everybody. More coffee?”

  Numbly, Johnson nodded; Cope poured more coffee.

  “If you haven’t ordered, I recommend the pork hash. I myself eat it daily. It is simple fare, but the cook has a feel for it.”

  Johnson mumbled he would have the hash. The waiter departed. Cope smiled at him.

  He certainly didn’t look like a monster, Johnson thought. Quick, energetic, even nervous—but no monster. On the contrary, there was a youthful, almost childish enthusiasm about him, yet also an air of determination and competence. He seemed like a man who got things done.

  “What are your plans now?” Cope asked cheerfully, stirring a dollop of black molasses in his coffee.

  “I’m not supposed to talk to you.”

  “That hardly seems necessary now that the old schemer has left you behind. What are your plans now?”

  “I don’t know. I have no plans.” Johnson looked around the nearly empty dining room. “I seem to have been separated from my party.”

  “Separated? He abandoned you.”

  “Why would he do that?” Johnson asked.

  “He thought you were a spy, of course.”

  “But I’m not a spy.”

  Cope smiled. “I know that, Mr. Johnson, and you know that. Everyone knows that except Mr. Marsh. It is just one of the many thousands of things he does not know, yet assumes he does.”

  Johnson was confused, and it must have shown on his face.

  “Which fantasy did he tell you about me?” Cope asked, still cheerful. “Wife beater? Thief? Philanderer? Ax murderer?” The whole business seemed to amuse him.

  “He doesn’t have a high opinion of you.”

  Cope’s inky fingers fluttered in the air, a dismissing gesture. “Marsh is a godless man, cut loose from all moorings. His mind is active and sick. I have known him for some time. In fact, we were friends once. We both studied in Germany during the Civil War. And later we dug fossils together in New Jersey, in fact. But that was a long time ago.”

  The food came. Johnson realized that he was hungry.

  “That’s better,” Cope said, watching him eat. “
Now, I understand that you are a photographer. I can use a photographer. I am on my way to the far West, to dig for dinosaur bones with a party of students from the University of Pennsylvania.”

  “Just like Professor Marsh,” Johnson said.

  “Not quite like Professor Marsh. We do not travel everywhere with special rates and government favors. And my students are not chosen for wealth and connection, but rather for their interest in science. Ours is not a self-aggrandizing publicity junket, but a serious expedition.” Cope paused, studying Johnson’s earnest attention. “We’re a small party and it will be rough going, but you are welcome to come, if you care to.”

  And that was how William Johnson found himself, at noon, standing on the platform of the Cheyenne railroad station with his equipment stacked at his side, waiting for the train to carry him west, in the party of Edward Drinker Cope.

  Cope’s Expedition

  It was immediately clear that Cope’s party lacked the military precision that characterized Marsh’s every undertaking. His group straggled into the station singly and in pairs: first Cope and his charming wife, Annie, who greeted Johnson warmly and would not be drawn to say anything against Marsh, despite the prompting of her husband.

  Then a barrel-chested man of twenty-six named Charles H. Sternberg, a fossil hunter from Kansas who had worked for Cope the previous year. Charlie Sternberg walked with a limp, the result of a childhood accident; he could not shake hands because of a “felon,” a fistula in his palm; and he was subject to occasional bouts of malaria, but he exuded an air of practical competence and wry humor.

  Next, another young man, J.C. Isaac (“it just stands for J.C.”), who was Indian shy; six weeks earlier, he had been among a party of friends attacked by Indians. The others had been shot down and scalped, and only Isaac escaped, leaving him with a deep fear, and a facial tic around the eyes.

  There were three students: Leander “Toad” Davis, a puffy, asthmatic, bespectacled boy with protuberant eyes. Toad was particularly interested in Indian society, and seemed to know a lot about it. And George Morton, a sallow, silent young man from Yale who sketched constantly and announced that he intended to be an artist or a minister like his father; he wasn’t sure yet. Morton was withdrawn, rather sullen, and Johnson did not care for him. And finally Harold Chapman from Pennsylvania, a brightly talkative young man with an interest in bones. After being introduced to Johnson he almost immediately wandered off to poke through some bleached buffalo bones stacked near the station platform.

  Johnson’s favorite of the group was the lovely Mrs. Cope, who was anything but the deluded invalid Marsh had claimed. She would accompany them only as far as Utah. Then the six men—with Johnson making seven—would set out for the Judith River basin of northern Montana Territory, to hunt for Cretaceous fossils.

  “Montana!” Johnson said, remembering what Sheridan had said about staying away from Montana and Wyoming. “Do you really mean to go to Montana?”

  “Yes, of course, it’s tremendously exciting,” Cope said, his face and manner radiating his enthusiasm. “No one has been there since Ferdinand Hayden discovered the area back in ’55 and noted great quantities of fossils.”

  “What happened to Hayden?” Johnson asked.

  “Oh, he was driven off by the Blackfeet,” Cope said. “They made him run for his life.”

  And Cope laughed.

  West with Cope

  Johnson awoke in inky blackness, hearing the roar of the train. He fumbled for his pocket watch; it said ten o’clock. For a confused moment, he thought it was ten at night. Then the darkness broke with a shaft of brilliant light, and another, and flickering shafts illuminated his sleeping compartment: the train was thundering through long snow sheds as it crossed the Rocky Mountains. He saw fields of snow in late June, the brilliance so dazzling it hurt his eyes.

  Ten o’clock! He threw on his clothes, hurried out of the compartment, and found Cope staring out the window, drumming his stained fingers impatiently on the sill. “I’m sorry I overslept, Professor, if only someone had awakened me, I—”

  “Why?” Cope asked. “What difference does it make that you slept?”

  “Well, I mean, I—it’s so late—”

  “We are still two hours from Salt Lake,” Cope said. “And you slept because you were tired, an excellent reason for sleeping.” Cope smiled. “Or did you think I would leave you, too?”

  Confused, Johnson said nothing. Cope continued to smile. And then, after a moment, he bent over the sketch pad in his lap, took up his pen, and drew with his ink-stained fingers. Without looking up, he said, “I believe Mrs. Cope has arranged for a pot of coffee.”

  That night, Johnson recorded in his journal:

  Cope spent the morning sketching, which he does with great rapidity and talent. I have learned a lot about him from the others. He was a child prodigy, who wrote his first scientific paper at the age of six, and he has now (I believe him to be 36) published some 1,000 papers. He is rumored to have had a love affair before his marriage that was broken off, and then, perhaps in despair, he traveled to Europe, where he met many of the great natural scientists of the day. He met Marsh in Berlin for the first time and shared correspondence, manuscripts, and photographs. He is also considered to be an expert on snakes, reptiles and amphibians in general, and fish. Sternberg and the students (except Morton) are devoted to him. He is a Quaker, and peace-loving to the core. He wears wooden false teeth, which are remarkably life-like; I wouldn’t have known. In this way and nearly every other, he is utterly different from Marsh. Where Marsh is plodding, Cope is brilliant; where Marsh is scheming, Cope is honest; where Marsh is secretive, Cope is free. In all ways, Professor Cope shows greater humanity than his counterpart. Professor Marsh is a desperate, driven fanatic who makes his own life as miserable as the lives of those he commands. While Cope shows balance and restraint, and is altogether agreeable.

  It would not be long before Johnson took a different view of Cope.

  The train descended out of the Rocky Mountains to Great Salt Lake City, in the Territory of Utah.

  Established thirty years before, Salt Lake City was a village of wood and brick houses, carefully laid out in a regular grid pattern, and dominated by the white facade of the Mormon Tabernacle, a building, Johnson wrote, “of such breathtaking ugliness that few edifices anywhere in America can hope to surpass it.” This was a common view. Around the same time the journalist Charles Nordhoff called it “an admirably-arranged and very ugly building,” and concluded that “Salt Lake need not hold any mere pleasure traveler more than a day.”

  Although Washington claimed this as the Territory of Utah, and therefore a part of the United States, it had been established as a Mormon theocracy, as the scale and importance of the religious buildings made clear. Cope’s group visited the temple, the Tithing House, and the Lion House, where Brigham Young kept his multitudinous wives.

  Cope then had an audience with President Young, and he took his own wife with him to meet the elderly patriarch. Johnson asked what he was like. “Gracious man, gentle and calculating. For forty years, the Mormons were hounded and persecuted in every state of the Union; now they make their own state, and persecute the Gentiles in turn.” Cope shook his head. “You would think that people who had experienced injustice would be loath to inflict it on others, and yet they do so with alacrity. The victims become the victimizers with a chilling righteousness. This is the nature of fanaticism, to attract and provoke extremes of behavior. And this is why fanatics are all the same, whatever specific form their fanaticism takes.”

  “Are you saying Mormons are fanatics?” asked Morton, the minister’s son.

  “I am saying their religion has made a state that does not halt injustice, but rather institutionalizes it. They feel superior to others who have different beliefs. They feel only they possess the right way.”

  “I don’t see how you can say—” began Morton, but the others jumped in. Morton and Cope were always at loggerheads
on religious subjects, and the arguments became tedious after a while.

  “Why did you see Brigham Young?” Sternberg asked.

  Cope shrugged. “There are no known fossil deposits in Utah now, but there are rumors of bones in the eastern regions near the Colorado border. I see no harm in making friendships for the future.” And he added, “Marsh met him, last year.”

  The following day Mrs. Cope took the Union Pacific train back east, while the men traveled north by narrow gauge railway to Franklin, Idaho, “an alkali flats town,” Johnson noted, “with nothing to recommend it save that rail and stage lines enable one to leave it as soon as possible.”

  But in Franklin, while buying stagecoach tickets, Cope was suddenly accosted by the sheriff, a large man with small eyes. “You are under arrest,” he told Cope, taking him by the arm, “and charged with murder.”

  “Whom am I supposed to have murdered?” Cope asked, astonished.

  “Your father,” the sheriff said. “Back East.”

  “That’s ridiculous—my father died last year of a heart attack.” Despite being a Quaker, Cope was known for his flashing temper, and Johnson could see that he was doing his utmost to remain civil. “I loved my father with all my heart—he was kind and wise and supportive of my irregular scholarly wanderings,” he said with deep fury.

  The sudden display of eloquence took everyone aback. The men all followed Cope and the sheriff to the jail, from a polite distance. It turned out a federal warrant for his arrest had been filed in the Idaho Territory. It also turned out that the federal marshal was in another district and would not return to Franklin until September. Cope, said the sheriff, would have to “cool his heels” in jail until then.

  Cope protested that he was Professor Edward Drinker Cope, a United States paleontologist. The sheriff showed him the telegram stating that “Prof. E. D. Cope, paleontologist” was the man wanted for murder.