Sam Woodhull carried in his pocket the letter which Will Banion had left for Molly Wingate at Cassia Creek in the Snake Valley, where the Oregon road forked for California.  There was no post office there, yet Banion felt sure that his letter would find its way, and it had done so, save for the treachery of this one man.  Naught had been sacred to him.  He had read the letter without an instant’s hesitation, feeling that anything was fair in his love for this woman, in his war with this man.  Woodhull resolved that they should not both live.

He was by nature not so much a coward as a man without principle or scruple.  He did not expect to be killed by Banion.  He intended to use such means as would give Banion no chance.  In this he thought himself fully justified, as a criminal always does.

But hurry as he might, his overdriven teams were no match for the tireless desert horse, the wiry mountain mount and the hardy mules of the tidy little pack train of Banion and his companion Jackson.  These could go on steadily where wagons must wait.  Their trail grew fainter as they gained.

At last, at the edge of a waterless march of whose duration they could not guess, Woodhull and his party were obliged to halt.  Here by great good fortune they were overtaken by the swift pack train of Greenwood and his men, hurrying back with fresh animals on their return march to California.  The two companies joined forces.  Woodhull now had a guide.  Accordingly when, after such dangers and hardships as then must be inevitable to men covering the gruesome trail between the Snake and the Sacramento, he found himself late that fall arrived west of the Sierras and in the gentler climate of the central valley, he looked about him with a feeling of exultation.  Now, surely, fate would give his enemy into his hand.

Men were spilling south into the valley of the San Joaquin, coming north with proofs of the Stanislaus, the Tuolumne, the Merced.  Greenwood insisted on working north into the country where he had found gold, along all the tributaries of the Sacramento.  Even then, too, before the great year of ’49 had dawned, prospectors were pushing to the head of the creeks making into the American Fork, the Feather River, all the larger and lesser streams heading on the west slopes of the Sierras; and Greenwood even heard of a band of men who had stolen away from the lower diggings and broken off to the north and east—­some said, heading far up for the Trinity, though that was all unproved country so far as most knew.

And now the hatred in Woodhull’s sullen heart grew hotter still, for he heard that not fifty miles ahead there had passed a quiet dark young man, riding a black Spanish horse; with him a bearded man who drove a little band of loaded mules!  Their progress, so came the story, was up a valley whose head was impassable.  The trail could not be obliterated back of them.  They were in a trap of their own choosing.  All that he needed was patience and caution.