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 on 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, get 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