s one minute and opening them the next. He lay on a hospital bed, his
head swathed in bandages. That seemed all right. He had been wounded in
the charge against the Boche, and they had carried him to a
field-hospital. He was darned lucky to have come out of it alive.

But little by little the conviction was forced upon him that it wasn't as
simple as that. At length, when he was well on the way to recovery, he
learned to his horror that the interval of mental blankness, instead of
being a few hours, or at the most a day or two, had lasted for over a
year!

Without fully understanding certain technical portions of the doctor's
explanation, Stratton gathered that the bullet which had laid him low had
produced a bone-pressure on the portion of his brain which was the seat of
memory. The wound healing, he had recovered perfect physical health, but
with a mind blank of anything previous to his awakening in the French
hospital over a year ago. The recent operation, which was pronounced
entirely successful, had been performed to relieve that pressure, and
Stratton was informed that all he needed was a few weeks of convalescence
to make him as good a man as he had ever been.

It took Buck all of that time to adjust himself to the situation. He was
in America instead of France, without the slightest recollection of
getting there. The war was over long ago. A thousand things had happened
of which he had not the remotest knowledge. And because he was a very
normal, ordinary young man with a horror of anything queer and eccentric,
the thought of that mysterious year filled him with dismay and roused in
him a passionate longing to escape at once from everything which would
remind him of his uncanny lapse of memory. If he were only back where he
belonged in the land of wide spaces, of clean, crisp air and blue, blue
sky, he felt he would quickly forget this nightmare which haunted so many
waking moments.

Unfortunately there were complications. To begin with he found himself in
the extraordinary position of a man without identity. The record sent over
from the hospital in France stated that he had been brought in from the
field minus his tag and every other mark of identification. Buck was not
surprised at this, nor at the failure of anyone in the strange sector to
recognize him. Only a few hours before the battle the tape of his
identification-disk had parted and he had thrust the thing carelessly into
his pocket. He had seen too