Dusk had fallen in Death Valley when we emerged from the adobe building at park headquarters. The Panamints reached up into a deep blue sky like a solemn monument of desolation in a barren world. Daylight was fading from the peaks of the range. The fires of sunset had burned out of a long fingerlike cloud which slashed across the southern sky, leaving it cold and gray. The ambulance passed on the graveled road in a small cloud of dust which swirled ghostlike in the dusk. It was on its way to the scene of the accident in which Wallace Lambert had been reported killed.
We hurried across to our car and climbed in. Huntoon Rogers claimed his place beside me; behind were Morris Pine and Lieutenant Mowbray Turner from Detroit, his black brief case clasped under his arm, his light camel’s-hair t
