“I’d better tell you all I know,” he said, “because there is really no hope of curing me... you don’t understand... my will-power is gone.  The trouble is with my mind itself.  I don’t want to be cured....  I want what’s killing me.  I want it now, always, all the time.  So before anything happens to me I’d better tell you what I know so that our Government can make the proper investigation.  Because what I shall tell you is partly a surmise.  I leave it to you to judge—­to our Government.”

She drew from her muff a little pad and a pencil and seated herself on the chair beside him.

“I’ll speak slowly,” he began, but she shook her head, saying that she was an expert stenographer.  So he went on: 

“You know my name—­Kay McKay.  I was born here and educated at Yale.  But my father was Scotch and he died in Scotland.  My mother had been dead many years.  They lived on a property called Isla which belonged to my grandfather.  After my father’s death my grandfather allowed me an income, and when I had graduated from Yale I continued here taking various post-graduate courses.  Finally I went to Cornell and studied agriculture, game breeding and forestry—­desiring some day to have a place of my own.

“In 1914 I went to Germany to study their system of forestry.  In July of that year I went to Switzerland and roamed about in the vagabond way I like—­once liked.”  His visage altered and he cast a side glance at the girl beside him, but her eyes were fixed on her pad.

He drew a deep breath, like a sigh: 

“In that corner of Switzerland which is thrust westward between Germany and France there are a lot of hills and mountains which were unfamiliar to me.  The flora resembled that of the Vosges—­so did the bird and insect life except on the higher mountains.

“There is a mountain called Mount Terrible.  I camped on it.  There was some snow.  You know what happens sometimes in summer on the higher peaks.  Well, it happened to me—­the whole snow field slid when I was part way across it—­and I thought it was all off—­never dreamed a man could live through that sort of thing—­with the sheer gneiss ledges below!

“It was not a big avalanche—­not the terrific thundering sort—­rather an easy slipping, I fancy—­but it was a devilish thing to lie aboard, and, of course, if there had been precipices where I slid—­” He shrugged.

The girl looked up from her shorthand manuscript; he seemed to be dreamily living over in his mind those moments on Mount Terrible.  Presently he smiled slightly: 

“I was horribly scared—­smothered, choked, half-senseless....  Part of the snow and a lot of trees and boulders went over the edge of something with a roar like Niagara....  I don’t know how long afterward it was when I came to my senses.

“I was in a very narrow, rocky valley, up to my neck in soft snow, and the sun beating on my face. ...  So I crawled out...  I wasn’t hurt; I was merely lost.