Roger read it. It was the signboard of a local undertaking company, and the implication of such a need for every one descending into the valley was to the boy more sinister than any of the stories he had heard about it. As they reached the valley, dunes twenty to thirty feet high surrounded them on every side, with a salt sand between, sometimes soft, sometimes with a treacherous crust through which the hoofs of the mules sank, often cutting their legs, into the wounds of which the alkaline dust penetrated, causing great pain. The boy tore his coat into strips to bind around the pasterns of Duke, but even so some slight scratches were unavoidable.
They journeyed on over this fearful traveling for many weary miles, till, suddenly, Roger's quick eyes, eagerly looking for new things, discerned at the entrance to a small rock-bound canyon a sliver of wood broken off and sticking upright in the sand. As wood in that country is as unusual as it would be to see a shaft of burnished silver protruding from the arid ground, Roger rode up to it. There, penciled apparently recently on the wood, were the following words:
"Have gone down canyon looking for the spring; have been waiting for you.—Titus."
The boy called to the chief. Pedlar came over and read the message, then quietly and with reverence removed his hat.
"Poor chap!" he said very softly. "There is no spring in that canyon."
He summoned the other members of the party and silently they rode up the narrow cleft. Roger and the chief were riding in advance, and after a few minutes' ride the latter pulled his mule in sharply, and pointed to the figure of a man lying near a rock in the full glare of the sun.
"Perhaps he isn't dead?" said the boy, his heart in his mouth.
"No use to hope that, my boy," was the grave reply. "See, he must have lain down in the afternoon, when that spot was shaded, and died before the next sun rose. No living man would lie exposed to such a sun as this."
They rode up. It was as the chief had said, and Titus's friend, whoever he might have been, would never see him more.
"Shall we make a grave?" asked Roger in an awed tone.