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 "How do you know that?"

"I saw the smoke of our fire."

Our, David repeated. "You weren't in camp then?"

"His fire, I mean, where ours used to be."

"How did you know it was his?"

"I saw him about the camp."

"Then you went back to camp!"

"I didn't; I almost did; but I didn't. I never spoke with him again and I don't think he saw me. I'm sure he didn't. Then he was gone, David. I heard he sold the horse he bought for himself the day we got married; he sold it to a man near Mondora and he took the train from there."

"What did you do?"

"I went to Portland. It just happened to be Portland. I didn't go to anybody I knew. I didn't mention to anybody that I'd been married. It turned out that I didn't have to."

"You mean you had no baby."

"No; and I found out that Sam never told anybody, not even his own people. Neither of us wrote a letter from camp. Nobody knew, except people in Lakoon who never saw either of us before or since. Then in Portland, more than a year afterwards, I heard Sam was dead. He'd been killed in Alaska, they said."

"Who said?"

"His own family. They'd been trying to locate him because of some trouble over a land title. His brother wanted to sell some land that Sam owned a share of; so Hartley had to trace Sam and they found