"Afterwards, sir? Yes; the next thing I remember is lying upon a bison-skin in an Indian's skin lodge, and of the dark, dirty, wild face of a squaw looking down into mine. Then of being held up while my head was bandaged, and then for a long period all seemed misty and wild. I was hunting and shooting in the Rockies. Then I was galloping after bison with which the plain seemed to be black. Then I was prospecting for gold, and finding rifts in the rocks full and waiting to be torn out, but I could never get the gold, never succeed in hunting or shooting. There was always something to interfere, till at last I found that I was as weak as a child, and with almost the thought and action of a helpless babe, living in the lodge of a roving party of Indians who camped just where it seemed to be good in their own eyes. They are savages, whom the white man has ousted from nearly all their own hunting grounds; they are filthy and abominable in their ways, false and treacherous, all that is bad some have learned, but they nursed me through a long fever and delirium into a sort of imbecile childhood, from which I slowly gained my manhood's reason and strength, and then they gave me my rifle, and set me at liberty to join a party of gold-seekers across whom we came." "They found you there, lying half dead by the bear." "I suppose so, sir. All I know I found out by thinking the matter over. I recollect standing my rifle against a rock close to the track; and as my companion fled, I suppose they must have seen it in passing, hunted about for the owner and found me. I do not know for I could not understand the Indians, and they could not understand me. "I have nearly done, sir," said the young man speaking more briskly now. "I made my way to my old camping-place, but there was nothing there, and I was wondering whether Dan Portway had carried everything off, till I remembered seeing the bear charge him, and I went to the place, expecting, perhaps, to find his bones. But I made no discovery; and knowing what a hopeless task it would be to try and find the villain, I determined to come on here in obedience to the letter I had received before I went for my last trip, made my way to San Francisco, and there I learned of my grandfather's death." "You made no effort then to find your assailant?" said the lawyer. "No, sir, and it has proved to be the correct thing to do, for in coming here I have run him to earth." They sat gazing at each other for some moments in silence. Then Mr Hampton spoke. "You have the scar, then, made by your enemy's knife?" "Yes, sir, here," said the young man, slightly pressing back his hair, and bending forward so that the light of the shaded lamp fell upon a red line about half an inch from the roots. "And the injury to your head?" "Rather an ugly place still, sir. The skull was slightly fractured. Do you wish for that proof of my identity?"