hose who
waited and listened and watched learned the story of John Ball.
Midsummer came before he could gather the scattered threads of his
life in his memory, and even then there were breaks in this story
which seemed but trivial things to John Ball, but which to the others
meant the passing of forgotten years.

In fact, years played but a small part in the strange story that fell
from the old man's lips. "In time," said the Post physician, "he will
remember everything. Now only the most important happenings in his
life have returned to him."

John Ball could not remember the date when, as a young boy, he
left York Factory, on Hudson Bay, to come a thousand miles down to
civilization in company with the two Frenchmen who killed themselves
in the old cabin. But the slip of paper which Rod had discovered
filled that gap. He was the son of the factor at York Factory, and was
to spend a year at school in Montreal. On their trip down it was the
boy who found gold in the chasm. John Ball could remember none of the
details. He only knew that they remained to gather the treasure, and
that he, as its discoverer and the son of one of the lords of the
Hudson Bay Company, was to receive twice the share of the others, and
that in the autumn they were to return to York Factory instead of
going on to Montreal. He remembered indistinctly a quarrel over the
gold, and after that of writing some sort of agreement, and then,
early one morning, he awoke to find the two Frenchmen standing over
him, and after that, for a long time, everything seemed to pass as in
a dream.

When he awoke into life he was no longer in the chasm, but among a
strange people who were so small that they reached barely to his
shoulders, and who dressed in fur, and carried spears, and though the
sick man said no more about these people those who listened to him
knew that he had wandered far north among the Eskimos. They treated
him kindly, and he lived among them for a long time, hunting and
fishing with them, and sleeping in houses built of ice and snow.

The next that John Ball remembered was of white people. In some way
he returned to York Factory, and he knew that when this happened many
years had passed, for his father and mother were dead, and there were
strangers at the Post. At this time John Ball must have returned
fully to his reason again. He remembered, faintly, leading several
unsuccessful expeditions in search of the gold which he and the
Frenchm