At daylight he was on his way, stiff and cramped with the chill of the
desert night. Slowly he approached the mouth of the canyon, crossing a
bare burnt space that looked like an old "wash."

Suddenly he paused, staring. There, before him in the old wash, was the
fresh trail of two burros and a man. The trail of the man was not well
defined; rather scuffed in fact, as if he had been half dragged along.

"Hanging to the pack-saddle and letting the jack drag him" muttered the
lost Desert Rat. "I'll bet it's little Boston, after all, and I'm not
yet too late to square accounts with that _hombre._"

In the prospect of twining his two hands around the rascal's throat
there was a certain primitive pleasure that added impetus to the
passage of the Desert Rat up the lonely canyon. The thought lent new
strength to the man. Dying though he knew himself to be, yet would he
square accounts with the man who had murdered him. He would--

He paused. He had found the man with the two burros. There could be no
mistake about that, for the canyon ended in a sheer cliff that towered
two hundred feet above him, and in this horrible _cul de sac_ lay
the bleached bones of two burros and a man.

Here was a conundrum. The Desert Rat had followed a fresh trail and
found stale bones. Despite his youth, the desert had put something of
its own grim haunting mystery into this man who loved it; to him had it
been given to understand much that to the layman savored of the occult;
at birth, God had been very good to him, in that He had ordained that
during all his life the Desert Rat should be engaged in learning how to
die, and meet the issue unafraid. For the Desert Rat was a philosopher,