“What a great wonderful genius of a desert it is!” he mumbled. “It's worth dying in after all—a fitting mausoleum for a Desert Rat. Here I come staggering in, with murder in my heart, stultifying my manhood with the excuse that it would be justice in the abstract, and the Lord shows me an example of the vanity and littleness of life. All right, Boston, old man. You win, I guess, but I've got an ace coppered, and even if you do get through, some day you'll pay the price.”
He sat there on the bleached skull, his head in his hands, trembling, pondering, yet unafraid in the face of the knowledge that here his wanderings must end. He was right. It was a spot eminently befitting the finish of such a man. It was at least exclusive, for the vulgar and the common would never perish here. In all the centuries since its formation no human feet, save his own and those of the man whose skeleton lay before him, had ever awakened the echoes in its silent halls. Pioneers, dreamers both, men of the Great Outdoors, each had heard the call of the silent places—each had essayed to fight his way into the treasure vaults of the desert; and as they had begun, so had they finished—in the arms of Nature, who had claimed the utmost of their love.
The Desert Rat was a true son of the desert. To him the scowl of the sun-baked land at midday had always turned to a smile of promise at dawn; to him the darkest night was but the forerunner of another day of glorious battle, when he could rise out of the sage, stretch his young legs and watch the sun rise over his empire. He knew the desert—he saw the issue now, but still he did not falter.
“Poor little wife,” he mumbled; “poor little unborn baby! You'll hope, through the long years, waiting for me to come back—and you'll never know!”
His faltering gaze wandered down the canyon where his own tracks and those of the dead shone gray against the brown of the sun-swept wash. He had followed a trail that might have been ten years old; perhaps, in the years to come, some other wanderer would see his tracks, halting, staggering, uncertain, blazing the ancient call of the desert: “Come to me or I perish.” And following the trail, even as the Desert Rat had followed this other, he, too, in his own time, would come at length to the finish—and wonder.
The Desert Rat sighed, but if in that supreme moment he wept it was not for himself. He had many things to think of, he had much of happiness to renounce, but he was of that breed that dares to approach the end.
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch.
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
For him the trail had ended here, as it had for this other remnant of vanished life that lay before him now with arms outstretched. The Desert Rat stared at the relic. A cross! The body formed a cross! Here again was The Promise—
A thought came to the perishing wanderer. “I'll leave a message” he gobbled. He could not forbear a joke. “To be delivered when called for” he added. “This other man might have done the same, but perhaps he didn't care—perhaps there wasn't anybody waiting at home for him.”
From his shirt pocket he drew the stub of a lead pencil and the note-book in which he had written his will and the record of his betrayal. He added the story of his wanderings since leaving Chuckwalla Tanks, and the postscript: