Bone Idol by Paige Turner Read Free Book Online Page B

rock, steppes and buttes, riverbeds that might have run dry thousands upon thousands of years ago. Spires and www.total-e-bound.com
    pinnacles of red rock stood up against the horizon. The sky was a rich, saturated blue—a colour so deep and intense it seemed almost solid.
    Henry offered her his arm and she took it gratefully, clinging to him for support.
    He pointed out the prickly pear cactus with its flat, fleshy pads, its vicious spines and its red and purple flowers. A few of the delicate pink-white flowers known as prairie smoke were still apparent here and there, though they would soon be gone.
    Maude, though, could not be distracted from her misery, and she continued to look pale and wan as they walked, the sweat standing out on her brow and dampening the satin beneath her arms. But she struggled on gamely—Henry admired her staying power if not her sense—and eventually they came within sight of the camp.
    It consisted of a curious collection of makeshift dwellings. There were simple canvas tents that could presumably be moved around the camp as needed. Then there were more permanent structures, wooden huts nailed together from all sorts of odd bits and pieces of timber—panels from orange crates, sections of railway sleeper and even stranger and more unusual materials. Henry spotted a hut constructed partly from fossilised bones.
    He had just pointed it out to his weary companion when a long, rolling rumble echoed across the desert, bouncing back from outcroppings of rock with a sound like the roar of a dinosaur. Maude gave a little yelp and clutched at Henry’s arm. She seemed nervous, perpetually on edge—and no wonder with a husband like Gideon Dawlish.
    “What was that?” she asked, looking wildly about herself.
    Henry quickly sought to reassure her. “It’s quite all right—it’s merely the workmen blasting one of the larger specimens from the rock.”
    “Blasting…?” Maude sounded bewildered.
    “Yes, with dynamite. It’s the quickest way to get the fossils out of the ground and into museums and private collections. Barbaric, really, but it’s how it’s done.”
    “Doesn’t it do the most dreadful damage?” she asked, clearly aghast.
    “Sometimes, of course, it does,” Henry replied. It wasn’t a practice he cared for himself.
    “But bone hunting is a competitive business, and many men would rather waste specimens than time. From what I’m told, the foreman here is a careful, sober kind of man. He knows what he’s doing, and sets the blasts up with care. Most of the fossils are retrieved more or less intact.”
    Their conversation was interrupted when the camp suddenly came alive. Grimy men in shirtsleeves came running up to greet them, hungry no doubt for news from the outside world, possibly hoping for messages from loved ones.
    An enormous man with work-scarred hands stopped in front of Henry and offered him a tin mug, which he accepted gratefully. The man raised one huge hand to wipe sweat from his eyes, leaving a smear of red dust that made him look like a painted savage.
    Henry took a brief swallow of the warm, slightly brackish water before passing the better part of it to Maude. Then he pulled from his pocket the letters, telegrams and messages, some of them months old and many of them creased or torn, which he had collected from the railway man at the outset of their journey. The men clustered eagerly around him, rough and dirty, but genial and touching in their gratitude.
    As they read their messages, some of them following the words with their fingers as they puzzled them out, some of them appealing for help from their fellows, Henry glanced across at Maude.
    She was drinking thirstily and was clearly distressed, taking rapid, shallow breaths against the constricting whalebone of her corsets. She wiped the back of her hand across her brow, and as her sleeve rode up slightly, he thought he saw the ugly, yellow-green of an old bruise on her delicate wrist. Had