e going to think me the most
despicable kind of man; you are not going to doubt, then,--for the
answers will not let you doubt,--that I was the one who hurt your
father. You, and every one else, are going to feel--not only because
of that, but because of what you will learn about me--that nothing that
may happen to me will be more than I justly deserve.

I don't seem to care very much what people other than you may think; as
the time grows nearer, I feel that I care less and less about that; but
I do care very much--and more and more--that you are going to think of
me in this way. It is very hard for me to know that you are going to
regret that you ever let me talk with you in the friendly way you did,
or that you let me walk beside you on the station platform at Spokane,
and that you are going to shrink with horror when you recollect that
you let me touch you and put my hand upon your arm. I feel that you do
not yet believe that it was I who attacked your father; and I ask
you--even in face of the proof which you are so soon to receive--not to
believe it. I took this train--

He stopped writing, recollecting that the letter was to be given to
Connery unsealed and that Connery might read it; he scratched out the
sentence he had begun; then he thought a moment and went on:

I ask you not to believe that. More than that, I ask you--when you
have learned who I am--still to believe in me. I don't ask you to
defend me against others; you could not do that, for you will see no
one who will not hate and despise me. But I beg of you, in all honesty
and faith, not to let yourself feel as they do toward me. I want you
to believe--

He stopped again, but not because he felt that Harriet Santoine would
not believe what he was asking her to believe; instead, it was because
he knew she would. Mechanically he opened his traveling-bag and got
out a cigar, bit off the end and forgetting in his absorption to light
it, puffed and sucked at it. The future was sure ahead of him; he
foresaw it plainly, in detail even, for what was happening to him was
only the fulfillment of a threat which had been over him ever since he
landed at Seattle. He was going out of life--not only Harriet
Santoine's life, but all life, and the letter he was writing would make
Harriet Santoine believe his death to have been an act of injustice, of
cruelty. She could not help but feel that she herself had been in a
way instrumental in his death,