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:

The company in which I will be found was not of my own seeking.
He was here before me by several years and I found nothing
whereby he might be identified.

He tore the leaves out of the note-book, stuffed them inside his empty
canteen and screwed the cap on tight; after which he cast about for a
prominent place where he might leave his last message to the world.

At the head of the canyon stood an extinct volcano, its precipitous
sides forming the barrier at the western end of the canyon. Away back
in the years when the world was young, a stream of thin soupy lava,
spewed from this ancient crater, had flowed down the canyon out onto
the desert. It was this which the Desert Rat had at first taken for an
old "wash." Owing to the pitch of the canyon floor, most of the lava
had run out, but a thin crust, averaging in thickness from a quarter to
three quarters of an inch, still remained. Originally, this thin lava
had been a creamy white, but with the passage of centuries the sun had
baked it to a dirty brown and the lava had become disintegrated and
rotten. As the hot lava had hardened and dried it had cracked, after
the fashion of a lake bed when the water has evaporated, but into
millions and millions of smaller cracks than in the case where water
has evaporated from mud. As a result of this peculiar condition, the
entire lava capping in the canyon was split into small fragments, each