“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, amigo—’”
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.