DENVER, June 20.
God forgive us, mother, we are hunting the wrong man! I have not slept
any all night. I am now awaiting, at dawn, for the morning train--and
how the minutes drag, how they drag!
This Jacob Fuller is a cousin of the guilty one. How stupid we have been
not to reflect that the guilty one would never again wear his own name
after that fiendish deed! The Denver Fuller is four years younger than
the other one; he came here a young widower in '79, aged twenty-one--a
year before you were married; and the documents to prove it are
innumerable. Last night I talked with familiar friends of his who have
known him from the day of his arrival. I said nothing, but a few days
from now I will land him in this town again, with the loss upon his mine
made good; and there will be a banquet, and a torch-light procession,
and there will not be any expense on anybody but me. Do you call this
“gush”? I am only a boy, as you well know; it is my privilege. By-and-by
I shall not be a boy any more.
SILVER GULCH, July 3.
Mother, he is gone! Gone, and left no trace. The scent was cold when I
came. To-day I am out of bed for the first time since. I wish I were not
a boy; then I could stand shocks better. They all think he went west.
I start to-night, in a wagon--two or three hours of that, then I get a
train. I don't know where I'm going, but I must go; to try to keep still
would be torture.
Of course he has effaced himself with a new name and a disguise. This
means that I may have to search the whole globe to find him. Indeed it
is what I expect. Do you see, mother? It is I that am the Wandering Jew.
The irony of it! We arranged that for another.
Think of the difficulties! And there would be none if I only could
advertise for him. But if there is any way to do it that would not
frighten him, I have not been able to think it out, and I have tried
till my brains are addled. “If the gentleman who lately bought a mine
in Mexico and sold one in Denver will send his address to--” (to whom,
mother?), “it will be explained to him that it was all a mistake; his
forgiveness will be asked, and full reparation made for a loss which he
sustained in a certain matter.” Do you see? He would think it a trap.
Well, any one would. If I should say, “It is now known that he was not
the man wanted, but another man--a man who once bore the same name, but
discarded it for good reasons”--would that answer? But the Denver people
would wake up then and say “Oho!” and they would remember about the
suspicious greenbacks, and say, “Why did he run away if he wasn't the
right man?--it is too thin.” If I failed to find him he would be ruined
there--there where there is no taint upon him now. You have a better
head than mine. Help me.
I have one clue, and only one. I know his handwriting. If he puts his
new false name upon a hotel register and does not disguise it too much,
it will be valuable to me if I ever run across it.
SAN FRANCISCO, June 28, 1898.
You already know how well I have searched the states from Colorado to
the Pacific, and how nearly I came to getting him once. Well, I have had
another close miss. It was here, yesterday. I struck his trail, hot, on
the street, and followed it on a run to a cheap hotel. That was a costly
mistake; a dog would have gone the other way. But I am only part dog,
and can get very humanly stupid when excited. He had been stopping in
that house ten days; I almost know, now, that he stops long nowhere,
the past six or eight months, but is restless and has to keep moving. I
understand that feeling! and I know what it is to feel it. He still uses
the name he had registered when I came so near catching him nine months
ago--“James Walker”; doubtless the same he adopted when he fled from
Silver Gulch. An unpretending man, and has small taste for fancy names.
I recognized the hand easily, through its slight disguise. A square man,
and not good at shams and pretenses.
They said he was just gone, on a journey; left no address; didn't say
where he was going; looked frightened when asked to leave his address;
had no baggage but a cheap valise; carried it off on foot--a “stingy old
person, and not much loss to the house.” “Old!” I suppose he is, now. I
hardly heard; I was there but a moment. I rushed along his trail, and
it led me to a wharf. Mother, the smoke of the steamer he had taken was
just fading out on the horizon! I should have saved half an hour if I
had gone in the right direction at first. I could have taken a fast tug,
and should have stood a chance of catching that vessel. She is bound for
Melbourne.
HOPE CANYON, CALIFORNIA, October 3, 1900.
You have a right to complain. “A letter a year” is a paucity; I freely
acknowledge it; but how can one write when there is nothing to write
about but failures? No one can keep it up; it breaks the heart.
I told you--it seems ages ago, now--how I missed him at Melbourne, and
then chased him all over Australasia for months on end.
Well, then, after that I followed him to India; almost saw him in
Bombay; traced him all around--to Baroda, Rawal-Pindi, Lucknow, Lahore,
Cawnpore, Allahabad, Calcutta, Madras--oh, everywhere; week after week,
month after month, through the dust and swelter--always approximately on
his track, sometimes close upon him, yet never catching him. And down to
Ceylon, and then to--Never mind; by-and-by I will write it all out.
I chased him home to California, and down to Mexico, and back again to
California. Since then I have been hunting him about the state from the
first of last January down to a month ago. I feel almost sure he is not
far from Hope Canyon; I traced him to a point thirty miles from here,
but there I lost the trail; some one gave him a lift in a wagon, I
suppose.
I am taking a rest, now--modified by searchings for the lost trail.
I was tired to death, mother, and low-spirited, and sometimes coming
uncomfortably near to losing hope; but the miners in this little camp
are good fellows, and I am used to their sort this long time back; and
their breezy ways freshen a person up and make him forget his troubles.
I have been here a month. I am cabining with a young fellow named
“Sammy” Hillyer, about twenty-five, the only son of his mother--like
me--and loves her dearly, and writes to her every week--part of which
is like me. He is a timid body, and in the matter of intellect--well,
he cannot be depended upon to set a river on fire; but no matter, he is
well liked; he is good and fine, and it is meat and bread and rest and
luxury to sit and talk with him and have a comradeship again. I wish
“James Walker” could have it. He had friends; he liked company. That
brings up that picture of him, the time that I saw him last. The pathos
of it! It comes before me often and often. At that very time, poor
thing, I was girding up my conscience to make him move on again!
Hillyer's heart is better than mine, better than anybody's in the
community, I suppose, for he is the one friend of the black sheep of the
camp--Flint Buckner--and the only man Flint ever talks with or allows to
talk with him. He says he knows Flint's history, and that it is trouble
that has made him what he is, and so one ought to be as charitable
toward him as one can. Now none but a pretty large heart could find
space to accommodate a lodger like Flint Buckner, from all I hear about
him outside. I think that this one detail will give you a better idea of
Sammy's character than any labored-out description I could furnish you
of him. In one of our talks he said something about like this: “Flint is
a kinsman of mine, and he pours out all his troubles to me--empties his
breast from time to time, or I reckon it would burst. There couldn't be
any unhappier man, Archy Stillman; his life had been made up of misery
of mind--he isn't near as old as he looks. He has lost the feel of
reposefulness and peace--oh, years and years ago! He doesn't know what
good luck is--never has had any; often says he wishes he was in the
other hell, he is so tired of this one.”