uld plainly see his expression of
wild distraction as he began to climb those gleaming stairs. Strangely
lustrous in the weird light, was that worn stairway of gold--gold, the
ancient metal of the Sun. With the slowness of one about to faint he
dragged himself up, while his breath seemed to be torn from his throat
in agonizing gasps. Behind him, the glowing liquid splashed against the
steps and the yellow metal of the Sun began to drip into its fiery
cauldron.

The child reached the leg of the horse and clung there.

... Then suddenly the whole scene began to shake as if I had been
looking at a mirage, while just behind my car I had a flashing glimpse
in that lurid light of an emerald-green deluge bursting in like a dark
sky of solid water, and in that split-second before a crushing blow upon
my back, even through that tangle of bedclothes, knocked me into
unconsciousness, I seemed to hear again the hopeless note in the voice
of my friend as he said:

"--an earthquake fault."

After what seemed to me aeons of strange, buzzing noises and peculiar
lights, I at last made out the objects around me as those of a hospital.
Men with serious faces were watching me. I have since been told that I
babbled incoherently about "saving the little fellow" and other equally
incomprehensible murmurings. From them I learned that the train the
other way was washed out, a tangled mass of wreckage just like my car,
both terminus stations wrecked utterly, and no one found alive except
myself. So, although I am to be a hopeless cripple, yet I am not sorry
that the skill and untiring patience of the great English surgeon, Dr.
Thompson, managed to nurse back the feeble spark of my life through all
those weeks that I hung on the borderland; for if he had not, the world
never would have known.

As it is, I wonder over the events of that night as if it had not been
an experience at all--but a wild weird dream. Even the gentleman with
the mass of silver hair is a mystery, for he was never identified, and
yet in my mind's recesses I can still hear his cultured voice asking
about the extra berth, and mentioning his pressing mission to Paris. And
somehow, he gives the last touch of strangeness to the events of that
fatal night, and in my mind, he becomes a part of it no less than the
child on the stairs, the burning inferno that lit the background, and
the great statue of that unknown hero who held out his scroll for a
moment in that lurid light,