, you
don't know." The speaker's voice was hard.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that, before you present me to your friends, to such people
for example--well such people as I met to-day--you have the right to
ask; and the unfortunate part of it is that, when you ask, I can't
answer."

"You mean----" the Kentuckian halted in perplexed silence.

"I mean," said Saxon, forcing his words, "that God Almighty only knows
who I am, or where I came from. I don't."

Of all the men Steele had ever known, Saxon had struck him, through
months of intimacy, as the most normal, sane and cleanly constituted.
Eccentricity was alien to him. In the same measure that all his
physical bents were straight and clean-cut, so he had been mentally a
contradiction of the morbid and irrational. The Kentuckian waited in
open-eyed astonishment, gazing at the man whose own words had just
convicted him of the wildest insanity.

Saxon went on, and even now, in the face of self-conviction of
lunacy, his words fell coldly logical:

"I have talked to you of my work and my travels during the past five
or six years. I have told you that I was a cow-puncher on a Western
range; that I drifted East, and took up art. Did I ever tell you one
word of my life prior to that? Do you know of a single episode or
instance preceding these few fragmentary chapters? Do you know who, or
what I was seven years ago?"

Steele was dazed. His eyes were studiously fixed on the gnarled roots
and twisted hole of a scrub oak that hung out over the edge of things
with stubborn and distorted tenacity.

"No," he heard the other say, "you don't, and I don't."

Again, there was a pause. The sun was setting at their backs, but off
to the east the hills were bright in the reflection that the western
sky threw across the circle of the horizon. Already, somewhere below
them, a prematurely tuneful whippoorwill was sending out its night
call.

Steele looked up, and saw the throat of the other work convulsively,
though the lips grimly held the set, contradictory smile.

"The very name I wear is the name, not of my family, but of my race.
R. A. Saxon, Robert Anglo Saxon or Robert Anonymous Saxon--take your
choice. I took that because I felt that I was not stealing it."

"Go on," prompted Steele.

"You have heard of those strange practical jokes which Nature
sometimes--not often, only when she is preternaturally cruel--plays on
men. They have pathological names for it, I believe-