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 great agony now.  But I love you.  Good-by.

     WILLIAM HAYS BANION.

  To MARGARET WINGATE,
  Fort Hall, in Oregon.

For an hour Molly sat, and the sun sank.  The light of the whole world died.

* * * * *

The other letter rested unopened until later, when she broke the seal and read by the light of a sagebrush fire, she frowned.  Could it be that in the providence of God she once had been within one deliberate step of marrying Samuel Payson Woodhull?

     MY DARLING MOLLY:  This I hope finds you well after the hard journey
     from Bridger to Hall.