Page:The Cave Girl - Edgar Rice Burroughs.pdf/237

 the liquids of decomposition had killed vegetation leaving the thing alone in all its grisly repulsiveness as though shocked, nature had withdrawn in terror.

Stark stood pointing toward it without a word as the others came up. Burlinghame was the first to reach Stark’s side. He bent low over the bones examining the skull carefully. John Alden Smith-Jones came panting up. Instantly he saw what Burlinghame was examining he turned deathly white. Burlinghame looked up at him.

“It’s not,” he said. “Look at that skull—either a gorilla or some very low type of man.”

Mr. Smith-Jones breathed a sigh of relief.

“What an awful creature it must have been,” he said, when he had fully taken in the immense breadth of the squat skeleton. “It cannot be that Waldo has survived in a wilderness peopled by such creatures as this. Imagine him confronted by such a beast. Timid by nature and never robust he would have perished of fright at the very sight of this thing charging down upon him.”

Captain Cecil Burlinghame acquiesced with a nod. He knew Waldo Emerson well, and so he could not even imagine a meeting between the frail and cowardly youth and such a beast as this bleaching frame must once have supported. And at their feet the bones of Flatfoot lay mute witnesses to the impossible.