We got out and surveyed the road to the right. It proved to be an excellent detour, which a few yards further joined the left fork. This was the last straw. I left Toby, who was trying to redeem her criminal rectitude by busying herself with the jack, and went out hatless into the scorching desert, like a Robert Hichens heroine. My objective was not Oblivion, but the crossroads two miles back, where with luck I might still hail a passing car. Though the sun was low, the heat drove down scorchingly. Only the necktie I tied about my forehead saved me from sunstroke. It was bright green, and must have made me look like an Apache; I had the consciousness of being appropriately garbed. At the crossroad half an hour’s wait brought no car to the rescue. Night was too near for anyone with commonsense to start across that uncharted waste. Obviously I could not wait longer, leaving poor Toby to fish disconsolately, as I had last glimpsed her, in the mud. Obviously, too, if I returned nobody would know of our plight, and I should have my four-mile walk for nothing. Looking aimlessly for help in this dilemma, my eye caught a scrap of a poster on a fence rail, which savagely and in minute pieces, I tore down and scattered to the desert. The poster read, “Keyes’ Good Road Book. It Takes You Where You Want to Go.” Heaven knows neither I nor Toby, with all her faults, _wanted_ to land in that chuck-hole. After I tore the poster, I wished I had saved it to inscribe a message to the passerby. “Well, take your medicine,” thought I. “You have no right to get into any situation you can’t get out of. Think of David Balfour and Admirable Crichton and Swiss Family Robinson and Robinson Crusoe. What, for instance, would Robinson Crusoe do?” Undoubtedly he would have found a way out. I only had to think constructively, putting myself in his place. The thought alone was stimulating. Gifted with omniscience in hydrostatics and mechanics, he would probably have skinned a few dead cattle, with which the desert reeked, made a rope, fastened it about the car’s body, looped it over the windmill, and hoisted it free,--and been half way to Deming by this time. As for that copycat Mrs. Swiss Family Robinson, she would certainly have produced a pull-me-out from her insufferable workbag. How would Crusoe have left a message without pencil or paper? I knew. Collecting handfuls of large white stones,--white, because darkness was imminent, I arranged them at the crossroads in letters two feet long, reading, 2 MI. WINDMILL HELP!