by now, but he is a government man, and close of mouth with
strangers. Bridger, I am sure--for the odd reason that he worships
you--will tell no one else, especially since he shares profits
with me, if I survive and succeed. One doubt only rests in my mind.
At his post I talked with Bridger, and he told me he had a few
other bits of gold that Carson had given him at Laramie. He looked
for them but had lost them. He suspected his Indian women, but he
knew nothing. Of course, it would be one chance in a thousand that
any one would know the women had these things, and even so no one
could tell where the gold came from, because not even the women
would know that; not even Bridger does, exactly; not even I myself.

In general I am headed for the valley of the Sacramento. I shall
work north. Why? Because that will be toward Oregon!

I write as though I expected to see you again, as though I had a
right to expect or hope for that. It is only the dead young man,
Will Banion, who unjustly and wrongly craves and calls out for the
greatest of all fortune for a man--who unfairly and wrongly writes
you now, when he ought to remember your word, to go to a land far
from you, to forget you and to live down his past. Ah, if I could!
Ah, if I did not love you!

But being perhaps about to die, away from you, the truth only must
be between you and me. And the truth is I never shall forget you.
The truth is I love you more than anything else and everything else
in all the world.

If I were in other ways what the man of your choice should be,
would this truth have any weight with you? I do not know and I dare
not ask. Reason does tell me how selfish it would be to ask you to
hold in your heart a memory and not a man. That is for me to
do--to have a memory, and not you. But my memory never can content
me.

It seems as though time had been invented so that, through all its
aeons, our feet might run in search, one for the other--to meet,
where? Well, we did meet--for one instant in the uncounted ages,
there on the prairie. Well, if ever you do see me again you shall
say whether I have been, indeed, tried by fire, and whether it has
left me clean--whether I am a man and not a memory.

That I perhaps have been a thief, stealing what never could be
mine, is my