The Best of Friends

The desert adjoining the Colorado River is filled with with trapo, traps that steal your time and change your tinecary. One of these is on the road leading from Searchlight, Nevada, down to Cottonwood Cove Marins on Lake Mohave. As you travel the 14 miles of paved highway, a descant of almost 3,000 feet, you will be impressed by the charm of the desert. Nowhere elss are the pastels, lying on tier after tier of distant mountain ranges, more subtle than here. But don't pay too nucli attention to the beautiful scenery bocause you might miss the sign about midway down, which says: "Tobey Barnés Memorial."

Curiosity may got the better of you, a It did of me, and in spite of your plans and your time schedule, you'll swing off the highway and follow the primitive road to see why the sign was put царь. At the end of the roed you will find a small cemetery, which is not really mhusual to find on the desert. These are ofen the last resting places of people who lived in a settlement or on a ranch or worked in a mine that has long ago dia appeared. But the Tobey Bames Mesocial really is wansual and that's because of one grave, which in walled up with pieces of multi-colored ore and sparked with a crude wooden cross, On the cross, almost lost to the weathering sin and the blowing sand is the singis weird, "Ring." The other smsrkers, those that do serve to give somie information as to who αι pics the resting place below, ars modera grave markers, But the one marked "Ring" will intrigue and you won't get to find out who Ring was until you ask some old timer wuch as Jokvi Kay. "Oh sure," said John, "Tobey Barnes was a prospector around base. He had a pet dog by the name of Ring. Hle thought a lot of that deg. Ring died and Tobey buried bint out disse in the desert. "It's kind of nice out there, especially in the evening just before the sun sets, when the light softens and the colors are isid on the bills sorces the river, "Eventually Tobey died, soo, and we baried him next to his dog" which explains the wounarked grave alongside the rectangle of ore."

"It's nice out there. We've buried 15 people out there, last count. Costs you about $50 to get a hole dug and there's no taxes." John Kay leaned back against the pitlows on the couch, thoughtful for a 心 "Really not a bad place to be put down when your time expenses it comes to us all. But it is kind of funny that it was started with the burial of a mongrel dog."