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."