y. "Away back yonder, a hundred million years
ago perhaps, so far that we can have no real conception of the time, the
sea was over all this part of the world. When it receded, or the ground
upheaved, vast subterranean reservoirs of salt water were left, and now,
when the rain sinks down into these full reservoirs a portion of the
salt water is forced to the surface, which makes the salt springs that
are scattered over this part of the country. It is a process that is
going on continually. At least, that's a plausible theory, and it's as
good as any other."

But most of the salt-makers did not bother themselves about causes, and
they accepted the giant bones as facts, without curiosity about their
origin. Nor did they neglect to put them to use. By sticking them deep
in the ground they made tripods of them on which they hung their kettles
for boiling the salt water, and of others they devised comfortable seats
for themselves. To such modern uses did the mastodon come! But to the
schoolmaster and the two boys the bones were an unending source of
interest, and in the intervals of labor, which sometimes were pretty
long, particularly for Mr. Pennypacker, they were ever prowling in the
swamp for a bone bigger than any that they had found before.

But the salt-making progressed rapidly. The kettles were always boiling
and sack after sack was filled with the precious commodity. At night
wild animals, despite the known presence of strange, new creatures,
would come down to the springs, so eager were they for the salt, and the
men rarely molested them. Only a deer now and then was shot for food,
and Henry and Paul lay awake one night, watching two big bull buffaloes,
not fifty yards away, fighting for the best place at a spring.

Ross and Shif'less Sol did not do much of the work at the salt-boiling,
but they were continually scouting through the forest, on a labor no
less important, watching for raiding war parties who otherwise might
fall unsuspected upon the toilers. Henry, as a youth of great promise,
was sometimes taken with them on these silent trips through the woods,
and the first time he went he felt badly on Paul's account, because his
comrade was not chosen also. But when he returned he found that his
sympathy was wasted. Paul and the master were deeply absorbed in the
task of trying to fit together some of the gigantic bones that is, to
re-create the animal to which they thought the bones belonged, and Paul
was fa