4 Life of a Fossil Hunter 



mine, to whom I gave them some years later when 

 we moved West, to find in the collection a lot of 

 baculites, labeled " Worms from Uncle James." 



When I was ten years old, I met with an accident 

 from which I have never completely recovered. I 

 remember the wild chase I was making after an 

 older boy, over the hay-mows and piles of shocked 

 grain in my father's barn. On the floor below, an 

 old-fashioned thresher, one of the first of its kind, 

 was making an ear-splitting noise, while outside the 

 two horses, hitched to an inclined plane, climbed 

 incessantly, but never reached the top. 



The boy climbed a shock of oats on the scaffold 

 in the peak of the barn, and " Charley-boy," as my 

 mother called me, following him, slipped through a 

 hole in the top of the ladder which had been cov- 

 ered by the settling oats, and fell twenty feet to the 

 floor below. The older boy climbed swiftly down 

 and carried me home insensible to my mother. 



Our family physician thought that only a sprain 

 was the result, and bandaged the injured limb; but, 

 as a matter of fact, the fibula of the left leg had 

 been dislocated, so that there was much suffering 

 and a little crippled boy going about among the 

 hills on crutches. 



The leg never grew quite strong again, and some 

 years later gave me a good deal of trouble. In 

 1872 I was in charge of a ranch in Kansas, and dur- 



