"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 Sarahsaid 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, ****** 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."Mrs.Jones nodded affirmation of his words, sighed and evidenced unmistakable signs of eagerness to go.
"I ain't been able to work since," her husband continued."And I ain't been able to figure out how to get back that big nugget.Sarah's got money of her own, and she won't let go a penny - ""He won't get down to THAT country no more!" she broke forth."But, Sarah, Vahna's dead - you know that," Julian Jones protested.
"I don't know anything about anything," she answered decisively, "except that THAT country is no place for a married man."Her lips snapped together, and she fixed an unseeing stare across to where the afternoon sun was beginning to glow into sunset.I gazed for a moment at her face, white, plump, tiny, and implacable, and gave her up.
"How do you account for such a mass of gold being there?" I queried of Julian Jones."A solid-gold meteor that fell out of the sky?""Not for a moment." He shook his head." It was carried there by the Indians.""Up a mountain like that - and such enormous weight and size!" I objected.
"Just as easy," he smiled."I used to be stumped by that propositionmyself, after I got my memory back.Now how in Sam Hill - ' I used to begin, and then spend hours figuring at it.And then when I got the answer I felt downright idiotic, it was that easy." He paused, then announced: "They didn't.""But you just - said they did."
"They did and they didn't," was his enigmatic reply."Of course they never carried that monster nugget up there.What they did was to carry up its contents."He waited until he saw enlightenment dawn in my face.
"And then of course melted all the gold, or welded it, or smelted it, all into one piece.You know the first Spaniards down there, under a leader named Pizarro, were a gang of robbers and cut- throats.They went through the country like the hoof-and-mouth disease, and killed the Indians off like cattle.You see, the Indians had lots of gold.Well, what the Spaniards didn't get, the surviving Indians hid away in that one big chunk on top the mountain, and it's been waiting there ever since for me - and for you, if you want to go in on it."And here, by the Lagoon of the Palace of Fine Arts, ended my acquaintance with Julian Jones.On my agreeing to finance the adventure, he promised to call on me at my hotel next morning with the letters of Seth Manners and the railroad, and conclude arrangements.But he did not call.That evening I telephoned his hotel and was informed by the clerk that Mr.Julian Jones and wife had departed in the early afternoon, with their baggage.
Can Mrs.Jones have rushed him back and hidden him away in Nebraska? I remember that as we said good-bye, there was that in her smile that recalled the vulpine complacency of Mona Lisa, the Wise.
Kohala, Hawaii, MAY 5, 1916.
