ling with the most formidable of thorns.

They were not altogether ill-matched, these two colossal protagonists
of the Saurian and the Mammal. The advantage of bulk lay altogether
with the Dinosaur, the three-horned King of all the Lizard kind. His
armament, too, whether for offense or for defense, was distinctly the
more formidable. Fully twenty feet in length, and perhaps eight feet
high at the crest of the massively-rounded back, he was of ponderous
breadth, and moved ponderously on legs like columns.

His splotched brown and yellow hide was studded along the neck and
shoulders with pointed knobs of horn. His enormous, fleshy tail, some
seven feet long and nearly two feet thick at the base, tapered very
gradually to a thick tip, and dragged on the ground behind him. But
the most amazing thing about this King of the Lizards was his
monstrous and awe-inspiring head.

Wedge-shaped from the tip of its cruel parrot-beak to its spreading,
five-foot-wide base, its total length was well over seven feet. Its
three horns, one on the snout and two standing out straight forward
from the forehead just above the eyes, were immensely thick at the
base and fined down smoothly to points of terrible keenness. The one
on the snout was something over a foot in length, while the brow pair
were nearly three feet long.

Almost from the roots of these two terrific weapons protruded the huge
horn goggles which served as sockets for the great, cold, implacable
lizard-eyes. Behind the horns, outspreading like a vast ruff from
three to four feet wide upwards and laterally, slanted a smooth,
polished shield of massive shell like the carapace of a giant turtle,
protecting the neck and shoulders from any imaginable attack.

The antagonist who had come in answer to the giant's challenge was
less extravagant in appearance and more compact in form. He was not
much over a dozen feet in length, but this length owed nothing to the
tail, which was a mere wriggling pendant. He was, perhaps, seven feet
high, very sturdy in build, but not mountainous like his terrible
challenger. His legs and feet were something like those of an
elephant, and he looked capable of a deadly alertness in action. But,
as in the case of the King Dinosaur, it was his head that gave him his
chief distinction. Long, massive and blunt-nosed, it was armed not
only with six horns, set in pairs, but also with a pair of deadly,
downward-pointing tusks--like those of a walrus, but m