me waiting for you back in Nebraska,” Mrs. Jonesobserved in cold, passionless tones.
“Now, Sarah, why should I hurt a poor Indian girl’s feelings? Of courseI didn’t.
“Well, she and Paloma talked Indian some more, and then Vahna says: ‘Ifyou stay, I’ll show you the biggest nugget that is the father of allother nuggets.’ ‘How big?’ I asked. ‘As big as me?’ She laughed.‘Bigger than you,’ she says, ‘much, much bigger.’ ‘They don’t grow thatway,’ I said. But she said she’d seen it and Paloma backed her up. Why,to listen to them you’d have thought there was millions in that onenugget. Paloma ’d never seen it herself, but she’d heard about it. Asecret of the tribe which she couldn’t share, being only half Indianherself.”
Julian Jones paused and heaved a sigh.
“And they kept on insisting until I fell for—”
“The hussy,” said Mrs. Jones, pert as a bird, at the ready instant.
“‘No; for the nugget. What of Aunt Eliza’s farm I was rich enough toquit railroading, but not rich enough to turn my back on big money—and Ijust couldn’t help believing them two women. Gee! I could be anotherVanderbilt, or J. P. Morgan. That’s the way I thought; and I started into pump Vahna. But she wouldn’t give down. ‘You come along with me,’she says. ‘We can be back here in a couple of weeks with all the goldthe both of us can carry.’ ‘We’ll take a burro, or a pack-train ofburros,’ was my suggestion. But nothing doing. And Paloma agreed withher. It was too dangerous. The Indians would catch us.
“The two of us pulled out when the nights were moonlight. We travelledonly at night, and laid up in the days. Vahna wouldn’t let me light afire, and I missed my coffee something fierce. We got up in the realhigh mountains of the main Andes, where the snow on one pass gave us sometrouble; but the girl knew the trails, and, though we didn’t waste anytime, we were a full week getting there. I know the general trend of ourtravel, because I carried a pocket compass; and the general trend is allI need to get there again, because of that peak. There’s no mistakingit. There ain’t another peak like it in the world. Now, I’m not tellingyou its particular shape, but when you and I head out for it from QuitoI’ll take you straight to it.
“It’s no easy thing to climb, and the person doesn’t live that can climbit at night. We had to take the daylight to it, and didn’t reach the toptill after sunset. Why, I could take hours and hours telling you aboutthat 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. Vahnatold 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 stretchout for a spell. Then, when the moon come up, I took a prowl around. Itdidn’t take long, and I didn’t catch a sight or a smell of anything thatlooked like gold. And when I asked Vahna, she only laughed and clappedher hands. Meantime my mountain sickness tuned up something fierce, andI 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 tellme where that nugget is.’ ‘It’s nearer to you right now than I’ll everget,’ she answered, her big eyes going sudden wistful. ‘All you Gringosare 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 laughand tease again. ‘How do you like it?’ she asked. ‘Like what?’ ‘Thenugget you’re sitting on.’
“I jumped up as though it was a red-hot stove. And all it was was arock. I felt nay heart sink. Either she had gone clean loco or this washer idea of a joke. Wrong on both counts. She gave me the hatchet andtold me to take a hack at the boulder, which I did, again and again, foryellow spots sprang up from under every blow. By the great Moses! it wasgold! The whole blamed boulder!”
Jones rose suddenly to his full height and flung out his long arms, hisface turned to the southern skies. The movement shot panic into theheart of a swan that had drawn nearer with amiably predatory designs.Its consequent abrupt retreat collided it with a stout old lady, whosquealed 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 chipsout of it. It had been coated with some sort of rain-proof paint orlacquer made out of asphalt or something. No wonder I’d taken it for arock. It was ten feet long, all of five feet through, and tapering toboth ends like an egg. Here. Take a look at this.”
From his pocket he drew and opened a leather case, from which he took anobject wrapped in tissue-paper. Unwrapping it, he dropped into my hand achip of pure soft gold, the size of a ten-dollar gold-piece. I couldmake out the greyish substance on one side with which it had beenpainted.
“I chopped that from one end of the thing,” Jones went on, replacing thechip 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, inmy way of thinking. And there was that lean old fellow with the eaglebeak that had dropped in on us one night. And there was about thirtyIndians with him—all slim young fellows.
“Vahna’d flopped down and begun whimpering, but I told her, ‘Get up andmake friends with them for me.’ ‘No, no,’ she cried. ‘This is death.Good-bye, _amigo_—’”
Here Mrs. Jones winced, and her husband abruptly checked the particularflow of his narrative.
“‘Then get up and fight along with me,’ I said to her. And she did. Shewas some hellion, there on the top of the world, clawing and scratchingtooth and nail—a regular she cat. And I wasn’t idle, though all I hadwas that hatchet and my long arms. But they were too many for me, andthere 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 thatchof sandy hair until they sank into an indentation. It was fully threeinches long, and went into the bone itself of the skull.
“When I come to, there was Vahna spread-eagled on top of the nugget, andthe old fellow with a beak jabbering away solemnly as if going throughsome sort of religious exercises. In his hand he had a stone knife—youknow, a thin, sharp sliver of some obsidian-like stuff same as they makearrow-heads out of. I couldn’t lift a hand, being held down, and beingtoo weak besides. And—well, anyway, that stone knife did for her, and methey 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 afive-hundred-foot fall, only I didn’t make it. I went into a bigsnow-drift in a crevice. And when I come to (hours after I know, for itwas full day when I next saw the sun), I found myself in a regularsnow-cave or tunnel caused by the water from the melting snow runningalong the ledge. In fact, the stone above actually overhung just beyondwhere I first landed. A few feet more to the side, either way, and I’dalmost 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 whathappened. All I knew was that I was Julian Jones and that I’d beenblacklisted in the big strike, and that I was married to Sarah here. Imean that. I didn’t know anything in between, and when Sarah tried totalk 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 inNebraska one moonlight evening, Sarah came out and put that gold chipinto my hand. Seems she’d just found it in the torn lining of the trunkI’d brought back from Ecuador—I who for two years didn’t even know I’dbeen to Ecuador, or Australia, or anything! Well, I just sat therelooking at the chip in the moonlight, and turning it over and over andfiguring what it was and where it’d come from, when all of a sudden therewas a s
nap inside my head as if something had broken, and then I couldsee Vahna spread-eagled on that big nugget and the old fellow with thebeak waving the stone knife, and . . . and everything. That is,everything that had happened from the time I first left Nebraska to whenI crawled to the daylight out of the snow after they had chucked me offthe mountain-top. But everything that’d happened after that I’d cleanforgotten. 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 gotthem at the hotel. One day, he said, making his regular run, I crawledout on to the track. I didn’t stand upright, I just crawled. He took mefor 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 tendays after the mountain-top to the time Seth picked me up. What I ate Idon’t know. Maybe I didn’t eat. Then it was doctors