-loss of memory?"

Steele only nodded.

"I told you that I rode the range on the Anchor-cross outfit. I did
not tell you why. It was because the Anchor-cross took me in when I
was a man without identity. I don't know why I was in the Rocky
Mountains. I don't know what occurred there, but I do know that I was
picked up in a pass with a fractured skull. I had been stripped almost
naked. Nothing was left as a clew to identity, except this----"

Saxon handed the other a rusty key, evidently fitting an
old-fashioned lock.

"I always carry that with me. I don't know where it will fit a door,
or what lies behind that door. I only know that it is in a fashion the
key that can open my past; that the lock which it fits bars me off
from all my life except a fragment."

Steele mechanically returned the thing, and Saxon mechanically slipped
it back into his pocket.

"I know, too, that a scar I wear on my right hand was not fresh when
those many others were. That, also, belongs to the veiled years.

"Some cell of memory was pressed upon by a splinter of bone, some
microscopic atom of brain-tissue was disturbed--and life was erased. I
was an interesting medical subject, and was taken to specialists who
tried methods of suggestion. Men talked to me of various things:
sought in a hundred ways to stimulate memory, but the reminder never
came. Sometimes, it would seem that I was standing on the verge of
great recollections--recollections just back of consciousness--as a
forgotten name will sometimes tease the brain by almost presenting
itself yet remaining elusive."

Steele was leaning forward, listening while the narrator talked on
with nervous haste.

"I have never told this before," Saxon said. "Slowly, the things I had
known seemed to come back. For example, I did not have to relearn to
read and write. All the purely impersonal things gradually retrieved
themselves, but, wherever a fact might have a tentacle which could
grasp the personal--the ego--that fact eluded me."

"How did you drift into art?" demanded Steele.

"That is it: I drifted into it. I had to drift. I had no compass, no
port of departure or destination. I was a derelict without a flag or
name."

"At the Cincinnati Academy, where I first studied, one of the
instructors gave me a hint. He felt that I was struggling for
something which did not lie the way of his teaching. By that time, I
had acquired some little efficiency and local reputation. He told me