"I told you that I rode the range on the Anchor-cross outfit. I did not tell you why. It was because the Anchor-cross took me in when I was a man without identity. I don't know why I was in the Rocky Mountains. I don't know what occurred there, but I do know that I was picked up in a pass with a fractured skull. I had been stripped almost naked. Nothing was left as a clew to identity, except this----" Saxon handed the other a rusty key, evidently fitting an old-fashioned lock. "I always carry that with me. I don't know where it will fit a door, or what lies behind that door. I only know that it is in a fashion the key that can open my past; that the lock which it fits bars me off from all my life except a fragment." Steele mechanically returned the thing, and Saxon mechanically slipped it back into his pocket. "I know, too, that a scar I wear on my right hand was not fresh when those many others were. That, also, belongs to the veiled years. "Some cell of memory was pressed upon by a splinter of bone, some microscopic atom of brain-tissue was disturbed--and life was erased. I was an interesting medical subject, and was taken to specialists who tried methods of suggestion. Men talked to me of various things: sought in a hundred ways to stimulate memory, but the reminder never came. Sometimes, it would seem that I was standing on the verge of great recollections--recollections just back of consciousness--as a forgotten name will sometimes tease the brain by almost presenting itself yet remaining elusive." Steele was leaning forward, listening while the narrator talked on with nervous haste. "I have never told this before," Saxon said. "Slowly, the things I had known seemed to come back. For example, I did not have to relearn to read and write. All the purely impersonal things gradually retrieved themselves, but, wherever a fact might have a tentacle which could grasp the personal--the ego--that fact eluded me." "How did you drift into art?" demanded Steele. "That is it: I drifted into it. I had to drift. I had no compass, no port of departure or destination. I was a derelict without a flag or name." "At the Cincinnati Academy, where I first studied, one of the instructors gave me a hint. He felt that I was struggling for something which did not lie the way of his teaching. By that time, I had acquired some little efficiency and local reputation. He told me that Marston was the master for me to study, and he advised me to go further East where I could see and understand his work. I came, and saw, 'The Sunset in Winter.' You know the rest." "But, now," Steele found himself speaking with a sense of relief, "now, you are Robert A. Saxon. You have made yourself from unknown material, but you have made yourself a great painter. Why not be satisfied to abandon this unknown past as the past has abandoned you?" "Wait," the other objected, with the cold emphasis of a man who will not evade, or seek refuge in specious alternatives.