Orphan of Creation by Roger MacBride Allen

of excitement. He was getting caught up in the mystery-solving, the detective work of the job. “But let me guess. We can’t see where the old dirt road crossed the path to the slaves’ burial ground because they—I guess we —kept the path in repair, filled in the washouts as they happened. Right?”
    Barbara grinned, squinting a bit. “Right. We’ll make an archaeologist out of you yet.”
    “So what we’ve got to do is locate every inch of the washout we can to get the best fix we can on the crossroads, then start scratching away the topsoil,” Livingston said.
    “Go to the head of the class. So you grab a bunch of those tomato stakes and walk the washout south of the burial ground path. Mark both sides of the washout every two or three meters or so, every place you see it. I’ll do the same to the north side.”
    Livingston went to the wheelbarrow and collected an armload of the tomato stakes, then walked to the far end of the site and started searching for the faint marks, the slight depression in the earth that betrayed the old course of the road.
    At first, he couldn’t see a thing, and was frustrated to look up and see Barbara pounding stake after stake. College football left a man with a real competitive streak, and falling behind goaded him to greater efforts. Finally, he spotted a flattened little notch in the earth about in line with the stakes his cousin was driving, and drove home one of his own. He bent low over the close-cropped grass and studied the earth. With a little grunt of triumph, he spotted the other side of the washout, and drove in a second marker.
    Suddenly, his eye seemed to know what to look for, and he was reading the ground, pounding in stake after stake. Even as he spotted another trace of the road, he marveled that he was seeing Barbara’s lost world, the signs of ways people had lived before his grandmother was born. He was catching the same bug Barbara had caught twenty years before, in search of a vanished hamster.
    Finally, the last of the stakes that could be set was pounded in. Barbara examined his work and was basically approving, though she adjusted the position of two stakes slightly. She drew the stakes-points into her rough sketch map, and then photographed the entire area yet again.
    Livingston was getting a bit tired of such relentlessly methodical procedure. “Barb, why are you working so hard to document all this? What’s the point of taking three pictures of everything?”
    Barbara picked up the tripod and moved it to a new position, Livingston trailing behind. She thought for a moment and spoke. “Liv, suppose you thought you were going to break the class record for, say, the fifty-yard dash—run it a half-second faster than anyone else in your school that year. A coach and a pal with stopwatches would be enough. Everyone could accept that. But suppose you were a complete unknown in track, just one guy out of thousands, and thought you might take three seconds off the all-time world record. Would two guys with stop-watches do it? Would the Guinness Book of World Records or Sports Illustrated settle for that?”
    “Hell no. There were a couple of guys chasing state track records back at Ole Miss. They arranged to have the attempts filmed, got the watches calibrated, and made sure the judges were impartial.”
    “Okay, then. If there really are gorillas buried here, I’m going to turn a lot of American history upside down. I want every step of the effort nailed down. I don’t want anyone to say that there was any way I could have faked it, or gotten it wrong, or spoiled the evidence. So let me take my pictures.”
    Livingston smiled. “I get the point. Tell you what, though. It’s getting kinda warm. I’m gonna see if I can scare up some lemonade or something. You want anything?”
    “How ‘bout a Diet Coke?” Barbara said absently as she peered through the viewfinder and fiddled with the focus.
    “Right.” Livingston turned and headed back to the