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