“The two of us pulled out when the nights were moonlight. We travelled only at night, and laid up in the days. Vahna wouldn’t let me light a fire, and I missed my coffee something fierce. We got up in the real high mountains of the main Andes, where the snow on one pass gave us some trouble; but the girl knew the trails, and, though we didn’t waste any time, we were a full week getting there. I know the general trend of our travel, because I carried a pocket compass; and the general trend is all I need to get there again, because of that peak. There’s no mistaking it. There ain’t another peak like it in the world. Now, I’m not telling you its particular shape, but when you and I head out for it from Quito I’ll take you straight to it.
“It’s no easy thing to climb, and the person doesn’t live that can climb it at night. We had to take the daylight to it, and didn’t reach the top till after sunset. Why, I could take hours and hours telling you about that last climb, which I won’t. The top was flat as a billiard table, about a quarter of an acre in size, and was almost clean of snow. Vahna told me that the great winds that usually blew, kept the snow off of it.
“We were winded, and I got mountain sickness so bad that I had to stretch out for a spell. Then, when the moon come up, I took a prowl around. It didn’t take long, and I didn’t catch a sight or a smell of anything that looked like gold. And when I asked Vahna, she only laughed and clapped her hands. Meantime my mountain sickness tuned up something fierce, and I sat down on a big rock to wait for it to ease down.
“‘Come on, now,’ I said, when I felt better. ‘Stop your fooling and tell me where that nugget is.’ ‘It’s nearer to you right now than I’ll ever get,’ she answered, her big eyes going sudden wistful. ‘All you Gringos are alike. Gold is the love of your heart, and women don’t count much.’
“I didn’t say anything. That was no time to tell her about Sarah here. But Vahna seemed to shake off her depressed feelings, and began to laugh and tease again. ‘How do you like it?’ she asked. ‘Like what?’ ‘The nugget you’re sitting on.’
“I jumped up as though it was a red-hot stove. And all it was was a rock. I felt nay heart sink. Either she had gone clean loco or this was her idea of a joke. Wrong on both counts. She gave me the hatchet and told me to take a hack at the boulder, which I did, again and again, for yellow spots sprang up from under every blow. By the great Moses! it was gold! The whole blamed boulder!”
Jones rose suddenly to his full height and flung out his long arms, his face turned to the southern skies. The movement shot panic into the heart of a swan that had drawn nearer with amiably predatory designs. Its consequent abrupt retreat collided it with a stout old lady, who squealed and dropped her bag of peanuts. Jones sat down and resumed.
“Gold, I tell you, solid gold and that pure and soft that I chopped chips out of it. It had been coated with some sort of rain-proof paint or lacquer made out of asphalt or something. No wonder I’d taken it for a rock. It was ten feet long, all of five feet through, and tapering to both ends like an egg. Here. Take a look at this.”
From his pocket he drew and opened a leather case, from which he took an object wrapped in tissue-paper. Unwrapping it, he dropped into my hand a chip of pure soft gold, the size of a ten-dollar gold-piece. I could make out the greyish substance on one side with which it had been painted.
“I chopped that from one end of the thing,” Jones went on, replacing the chip in its paper and leather case. “And lucky I put it in my pocket. For right at my back came one loud word - more like a croak than a word, in my way of thinking. And there was that lean old fellow with the eagle beak that had dropped in on us one night. And there was about thirty Indians with him - all slim young fellows.
“Vahna’d flopped down and begun whimpering, but I told her, ‘Get up and make friends with them for me.’ ‘No, no,’ she cried. ‘This is death. Good-bye,
Here Mrs. Jones winced, and her husband abruptly checked the particular flow of his narrative.
“‘Then get up and fight along with me,’ I said to her. And she did. She was some hellion, there on the top of the world, clawing and scratching tooth and nail - a regular she cat. And I wasn’t idle, though all I had was that hatchet and my long arms. But they were too many for me, and there was no place for me to put my back against a wall. When I come to, minutes after they’d cracked me on the head - here, feel this.”
Removing his hat, Julian Jones guided my finger tips through his thatch of sandy hair until they sank into an indentation. It was fully three inches long, and went into the bone itself of the skull.
“When I come to, there was Vahna spread-eagled on top of the nugget, and the old fellow with a beak jabbering away solemnly as if going through some sort of religious exercises. In his hand he had a stone knife - you know, a thin, sharp sliver of some obsidian-like stuff same as they make arrow-heads out of. I couldn’t lift a hand, being held down, and being too weak besides. And - well, anyway, that stone knife did for her, and me they didn’t even do the honour of killing there on top their sacred peak. They chucked me off of it like so much carrion.
“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.”
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
“But, Sarah, Vahna’s dead - you know that,” Julian Jones protested.
“I don’t know anything about anything,” she answered decisively, “except that
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 proposition myself, 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.”
