"Yes, it is," said Sutton.
"We can't forget you, William," said old John H. "We never could do that. But we won't talk about you. If someone comes and asks about you we'll act as if you were never here."
He paused. "Is that the way you want it, William?"
"Yes," said Sutton. "If you don't mind, that's the way I want it."
They stood silent for a moment, facing one another in the dark, then the old man turned around and clumped toward the lighted windows of the house, and Sutton, turning too, leaned his arms on the pasture bars and stared across the river where the faerie lights were blinking in a land of never-never.
Ten years, thought Sutton, and the letter's written. Ten years and the conditions of the past are met. Now the past can get along without me, for I was only staying so that John H. could write the letter…so that he could write it and I could find it in an old trunk six thousand years from now and read it on a nameless asteroid I won by killing a man in a place that will be called the Zag House.
The Zag House, he thought, will be over there across the river, far up the prairie above the ancient town of Prairie du Chien, and the University of North America, with its matchless towers of beauty, will be set on the hills there to the north and Adams' house will be near the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers. Great ships will climb into the sky from the Iowa prairies and head out for the stars that even now are twinkling overhead…and other stars that no man's eye can see unaided.
The Zag House will be over there, far across the river. And that is where someday, six thousand years from now, I will meet a little girl in a checkered apron. As in a storybook, he thought. Boy meets girl and the boy is towheaded with a cowlick and he's barefooted and the girl twists her apron in her hands and tells him what her name is…
He straightened and gripped the top bar of the pasture gate.
"Eva," he said, "where are you?"