In fact, years played but a small part in the strange story that fell from the old man’s lips.  “In time,” said the Post physician, “he will remember everything.  Now only the most important happenings in his life have returned to him.”

John Ball could not remember the date when, as a young boy, he left York Factory, on Hudson Bay, to come a thousand miles down to civilization in company with the two Frenchmen who killed themselves in the old cabin.  But the slip of paper which Rod had discovered filled that gap.  He was the son of the factor at York Factory, and was to spend a year at school in Montreal.  On their trip down it was the boy who found gold in the chasm.  John Ball could remember none of the details.  He only knew that they remained to gather the treasure, and that he, as its discoverer and the son of one of the lords of the Hudson Bay Company, was to receive twice the share of the others, and that in the autumn they were to return to York Factory instead of going on to Montreal.  He remembered indistinctly a quarrel over the gold, and after that of writing some sort of agreement, and then, early one morning, he awoke to find the two Frenchmen standing over him, and after that, for a long time, everything seemed to pass as in a dream.

When he awoke into life he was no longer in the chasm, but among a strange people who were so small that they reached barely to his shoulders, and who dressed in fur, and carried spears, and though the sick man said no more about these people those who listened to him knew that he had wandered far north among the Eskimos.  They treated him kindly, and he lived among them for a long time, hunting and fishing with them, and sleeping in houses built of ice and snow.

The next that John Ball remembered was of white people.  In some way he returned to York Factory, and he knew that when this happened many years had passed, for his father and mother were dead, and there were strangers at the Post.  At this time John Ball must have returned fully to his reason again.  He remembered, faintly, leading several unsuccessful expeditions in search of the gold which he and the Frenchmen had discovered, and that once he went to a great city, which must have been Montreal, and that he stayed there a long time doing something for the Hudson Bay Company, and met a girl whom he married.  When he spoke of the girl John Ball’s eyes would glow feverishly and her name would fall from him in a moaning sob.  For as yet returning reason had not placed the hand of age upon him.  It was as if he was awakening from a deep sleep, and Dolores, his young wife, had been with him but a few hours before.

There came another break in John Ball’s life after this.  He could not remember how, long they lived in Montreal, but he knew that after a time he returned with his wife into the far North, and that they were very happy, and one summer set off in a canoe to search for the lost chasm together.  They found it.  How or when he could not remember.  After this John Ball’s story was filled with wild visions of a great black world where there was neither sun nor moon nor stars, and they found gold and dug it by the light of fires.  And one day the woman went a little way back in this world and never came back.