morning--lest he lose his head
and fly the place penniless."

"I shall not forget."

"You will need to use these forms only in the beginning--once may be
enough. Afterward, when you are ready for him to vanish out of a place,
see that he gets a copy of this form, which merely says,

MOVE ON. You have...... days.

"He will obey. That is sure."

III

Extracts from letters to the mother:

DENVER, April 3, 1897
I have now been living several days in the same hotel with Jacob Fuller.
I have his scent; I could track him through ten divisions of infantry
and find him. I have often been near him and heard him talk. He owns a
good mine, and has a fair income from it; but he is not rich. He learned
mining in a good way--by working at it for wages. He is a cheerful
creature, and his forty-three years sit lightly upon him; he could pass
for a younger man--say thirty-six or thirty-seven. He has never married
again--passes himself off for a widower. He stands well, is liked, is
popular, and has many friends. Even I feel a drawing toward him--the
paternal blood in me making its claim. How blind and unreasoning and
arbitrary are some of the laws of nature--the most of them, in fact!
My task is become hard now--you realize it? you comprehend, and make
allowances?--and the fire of it has cooled, more than I like to confess
to myself. But I will carry it out. Even with the pleasure paled, the
duty remains, and I will not spare him.

And for my help, a sharp resentment rises in me when I reflect that he
who committed that odious crime is the only one who has not suffered by
it. The lesson of it has manifestly reformed his character, and in
the change he is happy. He, the guilty party, is absolved from
all suffering; you, the innocent, are borne down with it. But be
comforted--he shall harvest his share.

SILVER GULCH, May 19
I placarded Form No. 1 at midnight of April 3; an hour later I slipped
Form No. 2 under his chamber door, notifying him to leave Denver at or
before 11.50 the night of the 14th.

Some late bird of a reporter stole one of my placards, then hunted the
town over and found the other one, and stole that. In this manner he
accomplished what the profession call a "scoop"--that is, he got a
valuable item, and saw to it that no other paper got it. And so his
paper--the principal one in the town--had it in glaring type on the
editorial page in the morning, followed by a Vesuvian opinion of