How or when he could not remember.
After this John Ball's story was filled with wild visions of a great black world where there was neither sun nor moon nor stars, and they found gold and dug it by the light of fires.

And one day the woman went a little way back in this world and never came back.
It was then that the old madness returned.

In his search for his lost wife John Ball never found the end of the great cavern.

He saw strange people, he fought great beasts in this black world that were larger than the biggest moose in the forests, and he told of rushing torrents and thundering cataracts in the bowels of the earth.

Even in his returning sanity the old man told these things as true.
George Newsome, the factor, lost no time in writing to the Company at Montreal, inquiring about John Ball, and a month later he received word that a man by that name had worked as an inspector of raw furs during the years 1877 and 1878.