“And the buzzards didn’t get me either. I can see the moonlight yet, shining on all those peaks of snow, as I went down. Why, sir, it was a five-hundred-foot fall, only I didn’t make it. I went into a big snow-drift in a crevice. And when I come to (hours after I know, for it was full day when I next saw the sun), I found myself in a regular snow-cave or tunnel caused by the water from the melting snow running along the ledge. In fact, the stone above actually overhung just beyond where I first landed. A few feet more to the side, either way, and I’d almost be going yet. It was a straight miracle, that’s what it was. “But I paid for it. It was two years and over before I knew what happened. All I knew was that I was Julian Jones and that I’d been blacklisted in the big strike, and that I was married to Sarah here. I mean that. I didn’t know anything in between, and when Sarah tried to talk about it, it gave me pains in the head. I mean my head was queer, and I knew it was queer. “And then, sitting on the porch of her father’s farmhouse back in Nebraska one moonlight evening, Sarah came out and put that gold chip into my hand. Seems she’d just found it in the torn lining of the trunk I’d brought back from Ecuador—I who for two years didn’t even know I’d been to Ecuador, or Australia, or anything! Well, I just sat there looking at the chip in the moonlight, and turning it over and over and figuring what it was and where it’d come from, when all of a sudden there was a snap inside my head as if something had broken, and then I could see Vahna spread-eagled on that big nugget and the old fellow with the beak waving the stone knife, and . . . and everything. That is, everything that had happened from the time I first left Nebraska to when I crawled to the daylight out of the snow after they had chucked me off the mountain-top. But everything that’d happened after that I’d clean forgotten. When Sarah said I was her husband, I wouldn’t listen to her. Took all her family and the preacher that’d married us to convince me. “Later on I wrote to Seth Manners. The railroad hadn’t killed him yet, and he pieced out a lot for me. I’ll show you his letters. I’ve got them at the hotel. One day, he said, making his regular run, I crawled out on to the track. I didn’t stand upright, I just crawled. He took me for a calf, or a big dog, at first. I wasn’t anything human, he said, and I didn’t know him or anything. As near as I can make out, it was ten days after the mountain-top to the time Seth picked me up. What I ate I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t eat. Then it was doctors at Quito, and Paloma nursing me (she must have packed that gold chip in my trunk), until they found out I was a man without a mind, and the railroad sent me back to Nebraska. At any rate, that’s what Seth writes me. Of myself, I don’t know. But Sarah here knows. She corresponded with the railroad before they shipped me and all that.”