Sabra. I have started this eleven times and burned ten of them in the stove of the bunkhouse at the Little Ella, and the men think I am writing to a girl and rag me about it, and I let them. I am going to write this one through to the end and not read it over, because if I read it over I will burn it too.
I am alive. You will know that by now, because whoever brings this will have told you before you opened it, or you would not have opened it. I am not going to ask you to forgive that. I am going to try and tell you how it was, and then you can do what you like with it, and with me.
You remember I went up to Halfmoon about the Gilpin lease. That was true as far as it went. What I did not tell you was that there was no lease to see about. Gilpin had sold it out from under me in October, to a Denver company, and I had known it for six weeks and not said. I had put our money into it, the three hundred from the spring cleanup and the two hundred I borrowed on the mules from Bettis that you never knew about, and it was gone. That was the first thing. The second thing is that I owed money in Leadville besides, at a faro bank on State Street, a good deal of money, more than the claim would bring in three years, and the men who held my paper had told me in November that they would come up to Silverthread to collect it in person if it was not paid by Christmas. They would have done it, Sabra. I had seen them do it to a man in Oro City. I did not want them on your porch.
So when I went up to Halfmoon I was not coming back. I want you to know that plainly, so you do not waste any part of yourself wondering. I had a little money sewn in my coat and I meant to go over the pass to the Gunnison country and be somebody else. I had thought about it for a month. I had thought you would be better without me, and I still think so, and I do not say it so you will contradict me. I left the note on the table so you would not come looking until Thursday. I am sorry for the note. Of all of it I think I am sorriest for the note, because I wrote don't wait supper as if it were an ordinary week, and I knew when I wrote it that you would remember it.
The storm caught me above the second switchback. You will remember that storm. I made the line shack in the dark, and there was a horse in the lean-to and smoke in the chimney, and inside there was a boy lying on the bunk with a fever on him like a stove. He said his name was Lem. He had been there four days. He had come over from Fairplay on a stolen horse with a warrant behind him and he had taken a chill in the crossing at Halfmoon Creek and it had gone into his lungs. He was out of his head part of the time. In his right head he talked about his mother and his brother and a farm in Kansas, and about a dog he had there, and how he was going to go home in the spring and take whatever was coming to him and be done with it. He made me promise to write to his brother. Tallis Marten, Marion, Kansas. I said I would.
I did what I could for him. There was not much. I kept the stove going and gave him water and sat with him. He died about four in the morning on the second night. I want you to know he was not alone. I held his hand. I do not know if he knew it was me or thought I was his brother. I think the second, and I let him think it.
My horse had gone down in the drift below the shack when we came in, and broken her near foreleg, and I had shot her. You will remember it was the gray. So there I was in the morning, with a dead boy and a dead horse and his horse in the lean-to and a warrant on him and money owed on me, and the storm still blowing. I sat there till noon. I am going to tell you exactly what I thought, because I have lied to you enough. I thought: nobody is looking for him but his brother, and nobody is looking for me but men I do not want to find me, and you. And I thought: if Eben Hale is dead, the faro bank tears up his paper, because there is no collecting from a dead man with nothing, and nobody comes to Silverthread, and Sabra is a widow with a claim and a cabin and no debt on her but two hundred dollars to Bettis, which she can pay. And I thought: if Eben Hale is dead, I do not have to go home and tell her about Gilpin.
That last was the true reason, Sabra. The others were true too, but that one was the bottom of it.
So I put my coat on him and my boots and my watch in his vest and my knife on his belt. I took his coat and his hat and his possibles bag, which had a letter in it from his mother addressed to Lemuel Marten, and I took his horse, and I banked the stove up high and left the damper open. I will not tell you I did not know what the stove would do. I knew. I did it anyway, and I rode down the far side of the pass in the storm, and I hoped I would die in it and did not.