fire-worshipper toward the warmth of his camp-glow. He tended the fire carefully. He dared not let it go out; for that meant the sacrifice of another precious match.

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The elemental appetite awoke when, stooping to drink from the pool, he saw fish darting about in its clear depths. He worked with the cunning of a pre-historic man until, by means of the feed bag, which he emptied of its contents, he succeeded in catching two of these.

A long thorn of palo-verde served him for a knife in dressing them, and he cooked them in the earth, with hot stones, laying each fish between the split halves of broad lobes of the prickly pear. They were insipid, and full of bones, but they served to satisfy his hunger.

He decided to keep a record of the days that he should spend in this place; by sticking palo-verde thorns into an out-reaching branch of willow, near the pool. He would stick in a thorn for each day. He cursed the first one, as he thrust it against the wood; because he felt powerless to do anything else.

Following, half sullenly, a mere human instinct 45to be busy about something, he set about making a knife from the smallest plate of the buggy-spring. He heated it in his fire till the paint came off, broke it in two and spent the day working one thin end down to a cutting edge, on a big, rough boulder. By night he had six inches of blade with one rounded, sharp end.

45

He used this, next day, to cut ocotilla-stalks, to make a bed, scraping away the thorns with sharp stones. He worked all day; less because he wanted a bed than because he dimly realized that sanity lay in occupation. That night he set a snare, and before morning managed to catch a cotton-tail which he dressed and roasted for his breakfast.

He was getting over the feeling of being hunted. They would not search for him now, he reasoned; they must feel satisfied that he had died in the cloudburst. He bathed in the pool that day, when the sun was high, and set about constructing a fireplace against the big boulder. This would make fire-keeping easier.

The days slipped into weeks. Little by little the man was adapting himself to his environment. He learned to dry the mesquite beans and grind them between stones into a coarse flour. This he made into little cakes, which he baked upon a flat stone before the fire. Later, he turned over a patch of earth, watered it, and sowed it with the 

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