Dinosaur Wars

Chapter ten - Departure

At the East River, even at this early hour of the morning, the water was busy with steamships and tugs. Ferries darted back and forth across the waves with their cargo of commuters. James Addison led his party in his buggy. Behind him were wagons of equipment, donkeys, the familiar crew from his last expedition. Pat and Sven headed lines of packhorses. Jack Dime leaned forward on the seat of his covered wagon, eyes narrow in his crumpled face, jaw clenched, mouth tight and grim.

Addison reined his horse to a halt. The piers that jutted out from the shore were filled with vessels of various kinds. He stood up in his buggy looking out across the pier where there was a gap, the large vessel it housed nowhere to be seen.

A deckhand was coiling ropes on the tugboat on the other side of the pier. Addison called down to him, "Where's the Ajax?"

"Steamed out before sun up."

"But the tide's wrong."

"That's what I said."

Addison climbed down from his carriage and walked over to the space where the Ajax had been berthed. He looked out to where the channel narrowed, to craft making their way along this stretch. The Ajax was nowhere in sight. So Adam had been right. Masters was going to doublecross him, and even earlier than Addison had expected. But it didn't make sense. When they'd spoke in the theater, he hadn't given the younger man any indication of where the cave was. Masters could roam about for months, years in the desert and not find the spot. Addison had taken accurate compass readings - these he had not revealed to Masters.

Then, slowly, but gathering in volume till it became a definite clattering, the hooves of a large body of approaching horses could be heard. Along the shore, Anthony Masters rode a horse before a phalanx of wagons loaded with supplies. He looked like a general leading his troops.

Masters spurred his horse to a canter, leaving the wagons behind. He rode up to where Addison stood before the gap in the pier.

"You're early, James. Did you think I was leaving without you?

"Never crossed my mind."

Masters took a deep breath atop his horse and looked out over the horizon.

"It's a perfect day to sail."

"Sailing requires a ship."

"Indeed. We've spent the last two weeks provisioning. We filled the cargo hold with extra coal to accommodate the extra weight we'd be carrying on the return trip. An arduous business."

"It doesn't look to have wearied you much."

Masters smiled at Addison's sarcasm.

"This is a great thing we're embarking upon, James."

"It still does require a ship, Anthony."

"And we shall have one."

"It seems I need to make the question plain, otherwise we'll be dancing this jig all day. Where is Ajax?"

Masters pointed up the channel.

"There!"

Addison looked in the direction that Masters indicated, and just coming into view, steaming toward them, was Ajax. And directly behind the mighty steamship was something else, a broad, flat vessel, easily four times the ship's width.

"What's behind her?" Addison asked.

"It's a barge," Masters replied. "I had it purpose built at the shipwright round the cove. We need to get as many and as great a variety of specimens as we can in one voyage. Steam, James, gives us the muscle to do such things."