We hiked on. I had the message, hanging inside my shirt. It felt good. I suspected that Fitz ought to be the one to carry it; he was my superior. But he didn't ask for it, and I tried to believe that my carrying it made no difference to him. I was thinking about offering it to him, but I didn't. He had his camera, and the flag wrapped about his waist like a sash. We'd left Sally and our other stuff at the ranch, and were traveling light for this last spurt. It was a wagon trail right down the valley, and we could travel fast. The sun grew hotter, and a hole in my boot-sole began to raise a blister on my foot. Those fourteen days of steady trailing had been hard on leather, and on clothes, too. We passed several ranches. Along in the middle of the morning thunder began to growl in the hills, and we knew that we were liable to be wet. The valley grew narrower, as if it was to pinch out, and the thunder grew louder. The storm was rising black over the hills ahead of us. "That's going to be a big one," said Fitz. It looked so. The clouds were the rolling, tumbling kind, where drab and black are mixed. And they came fast, to eat the sun. It was raining hard on the hills ahead. We could see the lightning every second, awful zigzags and splits and bursting bombs, and the thunder was one long bellow. The valley pinched to not much more than a gulch, with aspens and pines and willows, and now and then little grassy places, and the stream rippling down through the middle. Half the sky was gone, now, and the sun was swallowed, and it was time that Fitz and I found cover. We did not hunt a tree; not much! Trees are lightning attracters, and they leak, besides. But we saw where a ledge of shelf-rock cropped out, making a little cave. "We'd better get in here and cache till the worst is over," proposed Fitz. "We'll eat our lunch while we're waiting." That sounded like sense. So we snuggled under. We could just sit up, with our feet inside the edge. "Boom-oom-oom!" roared the thunder, shaking the ground. "Boom-oom-oom! Oom! Oom! Boom!" We could feel a chill, the breeze stopped, as if scared, drops began to patter, a few, and then more, faster and faster, hard and swift as hail, the world got dark, and suddenly with roar and slash down she came, while we were eating our first sandwich put up by the two women. That was the worst rain that Fitz or I had ever seen. Between mouthfuls we watched. The drops were big and they fell like a spurt from a hose, until all the outside world was just one sheet of water. The streaks drummed with the rumble of a hundred wagons. We couldn't see ten feet. Before we had eaten our second sandwiches, the water was trickling through cracks in the shelf-rock roof, and dirt was washing away from the sides of our cave. Outside, the land was a stretch of yellow, liquid adobe, worked upon by the fierce pour. "We'll have to get out of this," shouted Fitz in my ear. "This roof may cave in on us."