All the evil in me was loosed by this adventure. I swore to myself that I would be revenged upon those people and any and all of their people, and that I would live if only to accomplish that. But eighteen months in which I lost all track of the Hawkinses cooled that purpose. I married, and Keturah Hawkins was half forgotten. Of my marriage it is not necessary to say anything. It took place in San Francisco and was forced upon me at the point of a pistol. My wife died within a year. I left the sea and became a prospector when I was not an idler. I was nearly 50 when a child was born. This is the boy known as Guy Vanton. After his mother’s death, very shortly after, I struck it rich. Concerning my money and the source of it I have nothing to say; concerning the boy’s mother nothing except that we were not married. I may not be his father, but I am the only father he has known. All these things I have told him. I would save him, if possible, from what has befallen me. You will see what that is shortly. After I became rich--so rich that I could not waste my substance in a night, or a week, or a year; so old that caution was the stronger impulse always and made me hoard what I had--after the death of Guy Vanton’s mother I lived just outside San Francisco with the boy and the memories of a vicious life. There is nothing like old age to intensify the good or evil in a man. Here was I with my memories, which all at once, in my loneliness, became vivid, alive, crawling. I thought of Keturah Hawkins and writhed. I thought of her jewels and a terrible greed filled me. I thought of that flogging on the _China Castle_ and my shoulders twitched; of the impact of Captain Hawkins’s fists and quivered, half raising a protective arm. I wrote again to Richard Hand and learned that these two people were dead; that their nephew had married and displeased Keturah Hawkins; that her fortune had gone to her niece. From Richard Hand I was able to learn something about these persons and to figure out a way I might strike at them and hurt or crush them. How was I able to get this out of him? Partly by threats to show him up as compounding with me to keep his brother out of a lawful inheritance; partly with money. I have no time for details and there are things that are better to go forever unrecorded. It was I, Jacob King, who hired a man to make love to and fascinate John Smiley’s wife. It was an easy thing to do, with her husband mostly absent on the beach. To avoid the townspeople’s eyes was more difficult, but it was managed with secret meetings of one sort or another. She was led to leave him, taking her baby girl with her; eventually she was led to me. How much of this Richard Hand surmised I don’t know or care. But he had no part in it beyond giving me facts about the Smileys to go upon.