Ah, low was your voice and eloquent your eyes that hour, and I forgot, - for a moment I forgot - everything but this pure love; and the heartbeat it called up and the hope, never to be realized - that I should live to hear you repeat the same sweet words in our old age, in just such a tone and with just such a look. I was innocent at that moment, innocent and good. I am willing that you should remember me as I was that night.
"When I think of him lying cold and dead in the grave I myself dug for him, my heart is like stone, but when I think of you - "I am afraid to die; but I am more afraid of failing in courage.
I shall have the pistol tied to me; this will make it seem inevitable to use it. Oh! that the next twenty-four hours could be blotted out of time! Such horror can not be. I was born for joy and gaiety; yet no dismal depth of misery and fear has been spared me! But all on account of my own act. I do not accuse God; I do not accuse man; I only accuse myself, and my thoughtless grasping after pleasure.
"I want Cora to read this as well as you. She must know me dead as she never knew me living. But I can not tell her that I have left a confession behind me. She must come upon it unexpectedly, just as I mean you to do. Only thus can it reach either of you with any power. If I could but think of some excuse for sending her to the book where I propose to hide it! that would give her a chance of reading it before you do, and this would be best. She may know how to prepare or comfort you - I hope so. Cora is a noble woman, but the secret which kept my thoughts in such a whirl has held us apart.
"You did what I asked. You found a place for Rancher's waiter in the volunteer corps. Surprised as you were at the interest I expressed in him, you honored my first request and said nothing.
Would you have shown the same anxious eagerness if you had known why I whispered those few words to him from the carriage door? Why I could neither rest nor sleep till he and the other boy were safely out of town?
"I must leave a line for you to show to people if they should wonder why I killed myself so soon after my seemingly happy marriage. You will find it in the same book with this letter. Some one will tell you to look in the book - I can not write any more.
"I can not help writing. It is all that connects me now with life and with you. But I have nothing more to say except, forgive - forgive - "Do you think that God looks at his wretched ones differently from what men do? That He will have tenderness for one so sorry - that He will even find place - But my mother is there! my father! Oh, that makes it fearful to go - to meet - But it was my father who led me into this - only he did not know - There! I will think only of God.
"Good by - good by - good - "
That was all. It ended, as it began, without name and without date, - the final heart-throbs of a soul, awakened to its own act when it was quite too late. A piteous memorial which daunted each one of us as we read it, and when finished, drew us all together in the hall out of the sight and hearing of the two persons most intimately concerned in it.
Possibly because all had one thought - a thrilling one, which the major was the first to give utterance to.
"The man she killed was buried under the name of Wallace. How's that, if he was her husband, William?"
An officer we had not before noted was standing near the front door.
He came forward at this and placed a second telegram in the superintendent's hand. It was from the same source as the one previously received and appeared to settle this very question.
"I have just learned that the man married was not the one who kept store in Owosso, but his brother William, who afterward died in Klondike. It is Wallace whose death you are investigating."
"What snarl is here?" asked the major.
"I think I understand," I ventured to put in. "Her husband was the one left on the road by the brother who staggered into camp for aid.
He was a weak man - the weaker of the two she said - and probably died, while Wallace, after seemingly collapsing, recovered. This last she did not know, having failed to read the whole of the newspaper slip which told about it, and so when she saw some one with the Pfeiffer air and figure and was told later that a Mr. Pfeiffer was waiting to see her, she took it for granted that it was her husband, believing positively that Wallace was dead. The latter, moreover, may have changed to look more like his brother in the time that had elapsed."
"A possible explanation which adds greatly to the tragic aspects of the situation. She was probably a widow when she touched the fatal spring. Who will tell the man inside there? It will be his crowning blow."
