[Letter on the printed stationery of the HOTEL ARGONAUT, Powell Street, San Francisco. Two sheets, pencil, the hand careful but unpracticed. Envelope addressed to "Mr. J. A. Fairfax, Clerk to the County Coroner, Port Hume," postmarked San Francisco, 4 November 1922. Filed unopened-flap-torn in 1913 drawer 7, with the Timmons deposition, by a hand unknown. No reply is on record.]
Dear Mr. Fairfax,
You will not remember me and I would not blame you for it. I was cabin steward on the Iphigenia and you took down my words in January of 1913, in the little room with the green stove, and you were civil to me when I was in a state, which I have not forgot.
It is ten years this week. I do not know why I am writing except that the date has been sitting on me like a sea-chest and I find I cannot get out from under it any other way.
I want to say plainly what I was too frightened to say then, though I think you knew it. The money that took me West came in two parts. The first I was handed. The second found me here, a draft on Wells Fargo with no letter accompanying, the month after I gave my address to a man of Mr. Reddick's office as I was made to promise I would. I have never spent the last of it. It is in a coffee tin and I expect it will stay there, for I find it is one thing to take money to hold your tongue and another thing entirely to drink on it.
I am steward at this hotel now, on the day desk of it. I have not gone to sea again and will not. When the fog horns go on the Bay of a night the men here say you get used to it. I have not got used to it.
Mr. Fairfax, here is the thing I carry, and then I am done. It is not the Captain refusing the north, nor the mate's face in the passage, though I told you of both true. It is that when I set down the last glass, he said thank you. Sirs in his position did not commonly thank me. I have turned it over ten years and I believe he knew what he was owning when he said it, and that I was the only soul aboard he could own it to, me being nobody.
I ask nothing. You may burn this. But if my deposition is still in its drawer, then let this lie beside it, so that whoever finds the one may find the other, and know that I did in the end have the conscience I claimed, though it ran a decade slow.
Respectfully yours,
JOHN TIMMONS
[Below the signature, in a different pencil, the clerk's small initials: J.A.F. — and a date, 14 Nov. 1922.]