A Double Barrelled Detective

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> A Double Barrelled Detective


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 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
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."




IV
"No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the
presence of ladies."

It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The lilacs and
laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning and flashing
in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind Nature for the wingless
wild things that have their homes in the tree-tops and would visit
together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow
flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of the
woodland; the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose
upon the swooning atmosphere; far in he empty sky a solitary oesophagus
slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and
the peace of God.

October is the time--1900; Hope Canyon is the place, a silver-mining camp
away down in the Esmeralda region. It is a secluded spot, high and
remote; recent as to discovery; thought by its occupants to be rich in
metal--a year or two's prospecting will decide that matter one way or the
other. For inhabitants, the camp has about two hundred miners, one white
woman and child, several Chinese washermen, five squaws, and a dozen
vagrant buck Indians in rabbit-skin robes, battered plug hats, and
tin-can necklaces. There are no mills as yet; no church, no newspaper.
The camp has existed but two years; it has made no big strike; the world
is ignorant of its name and place.

On both sides of the canyon the mountains rise wall-like, three thousand
feet, and the long spiral of straggling huts down in its narrow bottom
gets a kiss from the sun only once a day, when he sails over at noon.
The village is a couple of miles long; the cabins stand well apart from
each other. The tavern is the only "frame" house--the only house, one
might say. It occupies a central position, and is the evening resort of
the population. They drink there, and play seven-up and dominoes; also
billiards, for there is a table, crossed all over with torn places
repaired with court-plaster; there are some cues, but no leathers; some
chipped balls which clatter when they run, and do not slow up gradually,
but stop suddenly and sit down; there is a part of a cube of chalk, with
a projecting jag of flint in it; and the man who can score six on a
single break can set up the drinks at the bar's expense.

Flint Buckner's cabin was the last one of the village, going south; his
silver-claim was at the other end of the village, northward, and a little
beyond the last hut in that direction. He was a sour creature,
unsociable, and had no companionships. People who had tried to get
acquainted with him had regretted it and dropped him. His history was
not known. Some believed that Sammy Hillyer knew it; others said no.
If asked, Hillyer said no, he was not acquainted with it. Flint had a
meek English youth of sixteen or seventeen with him, whom he treated
roughly, both in public and in private; and of course this lad was
applied to for information, but with no success. Fetlock Jones--name of
the youth--said that Flint picked him up on a prospecting tramp, and as
he had neither home nor friends in America, he had found it wise to stay
and take Buckner's hard usage for the sake of the salary, which was bacon
and beans. Further than this he could offer no testimony.

Fetlock had been in this slavery for a month now, and under his meek
exterior he was slowly consuming to a cinder with the insults and
humiliations which his master had put upon him. For the meek suffer
bitterly from these hurts; more bitterly, perhaps, than do the manlier
sort, who can burst out and get relief with words or blows when the limit
of endurance has been reached. Good-hearted people wanted to help
Fetlock out of his trouble, and tried to get him to leave Buckner; but
the boy showed fright at the thought, and said he "dasn't." Pat Riley
urged him, and said:

"You leave the damned hunks and come with me; don't you be afraid. I'll
take care of him."

The boy thanked him with tears in his eyes, but shuddered and said he
"dasn't risk it"; he said Flint would catch him alone, some time, in the
night, and then--"Oh, it makes me sick, Mr. Riley, to think of it."

Others said, "Run away from him; we'll stake you; skip out for the coast
some night." But all these suggestions failed; he said Flint would hunt
him down and fetch him back, just for meanness.

The people could not understand this. The boy's miseries went steadily
on, week after week. It is quite likely that the people would have
understood if they had known how he was employing his spare time. He
slept in an out-cabin near Flint's; and there, nights, he nursed his
bruises and his humiliations, and studied and studied over a single
problem--how he could murder Flint Buckner and not be found out. It was
the only joy he had in life; these hours were the only ones in the
twenty-four which he looked forward to with eagerness and spent in
happiness.

He thought of poison. No--that would not serve; the inquest would reveal
where it was procured and who had procured it. He thought of a shot in
the back in a lonely place when Flint would be homeward bound at
midnight--his unvarying hour for the trip. No--somebody might be near,
and catch him. He thought of stabbing him in his sleep. No--he might
strike an inefficient blow, and Flint would seize him. He examined a
hundred different ways--none of them would answer; for in even the very
obscurest and secretest of them there was always the fatal defect of a
risk, a chance, a possibility that he might be found out. He would have
none of that.

But he was patient, endlessly patient. There was no hurry, he said to
himself. He would never leave Flint till he left him a corpse; there was
no hurry--he would find the way. It was somewhere, and he would endure
shame and pain and misery until he found it. Yes, somewhere there was a
way which would leave not a trace, not even the faintest clue to the
murderer--there was no hurry--he would find that way, and then--oh, then,
it would just be good to be alive! Meantime he would diligently keep up
his reputation for meekness; and also, as always theretofore, he would
allow no one to hear him say a resentful or offensive thing about his
oppressor.

Two days before the before-mentioned October morning Flint had bought
some things, and he and Fetlock had brought them home to Flint's cabin: a
fresh box of candles, which they put in the corner; a tin can of
blasting-powder, which they placed upon the candle-box; a keg of
blasting-powder, which they placed under Flint's bunk; a huge coil of
fuse, which they hung on a peg. Fetlock reasoned that Flint's mining
operations had outgrown the pick, and that blasting was about to begin
now. He had seen blasting done, and he had a notion of the process, but
he had never helped in it. His conjecture was right--blasting-time had
come. In the morning the pair carried fuse, drills, and the powder-can
to the shaft; it was now eight feet deep, and to get into it and out of
it a short ladder was used. They descended, and by command Fetlock held
the drill--without any instructions as to the right way to hold it--and
Flint proceeded to strike. The sledge came down; the drill sprang out of
Fetlock's hand, almost as a matter of course.

"You mangy son of a nigger, is that any way to hold a drill? Pick it up!
Stand it up! There--hold fast. D--you! I'll teach you!"

At the end of an hour the drilling was finished.

"Now, then, charge it."

The boy started to pour in the powder.

"Idiot!"

A heavy bat on the jaw laid the lad out.

"Get up! You can't lie sniveling there. Now, then, stick in the fuse
first. Now put in the powder. Hold on, hold on! Are you going to fill
the hole all up? Of all the sap-headed milksops I--Put in some dirt!
Put in some gravel! Tamp it down! Hold on, hold on! Oh, great Scott!
get out of the way!" He snatched the iron and tamped the charge himself,
meantime cursing and blaspheming like a fiend. Then he fired the fuse,
climbed out of the shaft, and ran fifty yards away, Fetlock following.
They stood waiting a few minutes, then a great volume of smoke and rocks
burst high into the air with a thunderous explosion; after a little there
was a shower of descending stones; then all was serene again.

"I wish to God you'd been in it!" remarked the master.

They went down the shaft, cleaned it out, drilled another hole, and put
in another charge.

"Look here! How much fuse are you proposing to waste? Don't you know
how to time a fuse?"

"No, sir."

"You don't! Well, if you don't beat anything I ever saw!"

He climbed out of the shaft and spoke down:

"Well, idiot, are you going to be all day? Cut the fuse and light it!"

The trembling creature began:

"If you please, sir, I--"

"You talk back to me? Cut it and light it!"

The boy cut and lit.

"Ger-reat Scott! a one-minute fuse! I wish you were in--"

In his rage he snatched the ladder out of the shaft and ran. The boy was
aghast.

"Oh, my God! Help. Help! Oh, save me!" he implored. "Oh, what can I
do! What can I do!"

He backed against the wall as tightly as he could; the sputtering fuse
frightened the voice out of him; his breath stood still; he stood gazing
and impotent; in two seconds, three seconds, four he would be flying
toward the sky torn to fragments. Then he had an inspiration. He sprang
at the fuse; severed the inch of it that was left above ground, and was
saved.

He sank down limp and half lifeless with fright, his strength gone; but
he muttered with a deep joy:

"He has learnt me! I knew there was a way, if I would wait."

After a matter of five minutes Buckner stole to the shaft, looking
worried and uneasy, and peered down into it. He took in the situation;
he saw what had happened. He lowered the ladder, and the boy dragged
himself weakly up it. He was very white. His appearance added something
to Buckner's uncomfortable state, and he said, with a show of regret and
sympathy which sat upon him awkwardly from lack of practice:

"It was an accident, you know. Don't say anything about it to anybody;
I was excited, and didn't notice what I was doing. You're not looking
well; you've worked enough for to-day; go down to my cabin and eat what
you want, and rest. It's just an accident, you know, on account of my
being excited."

"It scared me," said the lad, as he started away; "but I learnt
something, so I don't mind it."

"Damned easy to please!" muttered Buckner, following him with his eye.
"I wonder if he'll tell? Mightn't he?... I wish it had killed him."

The boy took no advantage of his holiday in the matter of resting; he
employed it in work, eager and feverish and happy work. A thick growth
of chaparral extended down the mountainside clear to Flint's cabin; the
most of Fetlock's labor was done in the dark intricacies of that stubborn
growth; the rest of it was done in his own shanty. At last all was
complete, and he said:

"If he's got any suspicions that I'm going to tell on him, he won't keep
them long, to-morrow. He will see that I am the same milksop as I always
was--all day and the next. And the day after to-morrow night there 'll
be an end of him; nobody will ever guess who finished him up nor how it
was done. He dropped me the idea his own self, and that's odd."




V

The next day came and went.

It is now almost midnight, and in five minutes the new morning will
begin. The scene is in the tavern billiard-room. Rough men in rough
clothing, slouch-hats, breeches stuffed into boot-tops, some with vests,
none with coats, are grouped about the boiler-iron stove, which has ruddy
cheeks and is distributing a grateful warmth; the billiard-balls are
clacking; there is no other sound--that is, within; the wind is fitfully
moaning without. The men look bored; also expectant. A hulking
broad-shouldered miner, of middle age, with grizzled whiskers, and an
unfriendly eye set in an unsociable face, rises, slips a coil of fuse
upon his arm, gathers up some other personal properties, and departs
without word or greeting to anybody. It is Flint Buckner. As the door
closes behind him a buzz of talk breaks out.

"The regularest man that ever was," said Jake Parker, the blacksmith:
"you can tell when it's twelve just by him leaving, without looking at
your Waterbury."

"And it's the only virtue he's got, as fur as I know," said Peter Hawes,
miner.

"He's just a blight on this society," said Wells-Fargo's man, Ferguson.
"If I was running this shop I'd make him say something, some time or
other, or vamos the ranch." This with a suggestive glance at the
barkeeper, who did not choose to see it, since the man under discussion
was a good customer, and went home pretty well set up, every night, with
refreshments furnished from the bar.

"Say," said Ham Sandwich, miner, "does any of you boys ever recollect of
him asking you to take a drink?"

"Him? Flint Buckner? Oh, Laura!"

This sarcastic rejoinder came in a spontaneous general outburst in one
form of words or another from the crowd. After a brief silence, Pat
Riley, miner, said:

"He's the 15-puzzle, that cuss. And his boy's another one. I can't make
them out."

"Nor anybody else," said Ham Sandwich; "and if they are 15-puzzles how
are you going to rank up that other one? When it comes to A 1 right-down
solid mysteriousness, he lays over both of them. Easy--don't he?"

"You bet!"

Everybody said it. Every man but one. He was the new-comer--Peterson.
He ordered the drinks all round, and asked who No. 3 might be. All
answered at once, "Archy Stillman!"

"Is he a mystery?" asked Peterson.

"Is he a mystery? Is Archy Stillman a mystery?" said Wells-Fargo's man,
Ferguson. "Why, the fourth dimension's foolishness to him."

For Ferguson was learned.

Peterson wanted to hear all about him; everybody wanted to tell him;
everybody began. But Billy Stevens, the barkeeper, called the house to
order, and said one at a time was best. He distributed the drinks, and
appointed Ferguson to lead. Ferguson said:

"Well, he's a boy. And that is just about all we know about him. You
can pump him till you are tired; it ain't any use; you won't get
anything. At least about his intentions, or line of business, or where
he's from, and such things as that. And as for getting at the nature and
get-up of his main big chief mystery, why, he'll just change the subject,
that's all. You can guess till you're black in the face--it's your
privilege--but suppose you do, where do you arrive at? Nowhere, as near
as I can make out."

"What is his big chief one?"

"Sight, maybe. Hearing, maybe. Instinct, maybe. Magic, maybe. Take
your choice--grownups, twenty-five; children and servants, half price.
Now I'll tell you what he can do. You can start here, and just
disappear; you can go and hide wherever you want to, I don't care where
it is, nor how far--and he'll go straight and put his finger on you."

"You don't mean it!"

"I just do, though. Weather's nothing to him--elemental conditions is
nothing to him--he don't even take notice of them."

"Oh, come! Dark? Rain? Snow? Hey?"

"It's all the same to him. He don't give a damn."

"Oh, say--including fog, per'aps?"

"Fog! he's got an eye 't can plunk through it like a bullet."

"Now, boys, honor bright, what's he giving me?"

"It's a fact!" they all shouted. "Go on, Wells-Fargo."

"Well, sir, you can leave him here, chatting with the boys, and you can
slip out and go to any cabin in this camp and open a book--yes, sir, a
dozen of them--and take the page in your memory, and he'll start out and
go straight to that cabin and open every one of them books at the right
page, and call it off, and never make a mistake."

"He must be the devil!"

"More than one has thought it. Now I'll tell you a perfectly wonderful
thing that he done. The other night he--"

There was a sudden great murmur of sounds outside, the door flew open,
and an excited crowd burst in, with the camp's one white woman in the
lead and crying:

"My child! my child! she's lost and gone! For the love of God help me
to find Archy Stillman; we've hunted everywhere!"

Said the barkeeper:

"Sit down, sit down, Mrs. Hogan, and don't worry. He asked for a bed
three hours ago, tuckered out tramping the trails the way he's always
doing, and went up-stairs. Ham Sandwich, run up and roust him out; he's
in No. 14."

The youth was soon down-stairs and ready. He asked Mrs. Hogan for
particulars.

"Bless you, dear, there ain't any; I wish there was. I put her to sleep
at seven in the evening, and when I went in there an hour ago to go to
bed myself, she was gone. I rushed for your cabin, dear, and you wasn't
there, and I've hunted for you ever since, at every cabin down the gulch,
and now I've come up again, and I'm that distracted and scared and
heart-broke; but, thanks to God, I've found you at last, dear heart,
and you'll find my child. Come on! come quick!"

"Move right along; I'm with you, madam. Go to your cabin first."

The whole company streamed out to join the hunt. All the southern half
of the village was up, a hundred men strong, and waiting outside, a vague
dark mass sprinkled with twinkling lanterns. The mass fell into columns
by threes and fours to accommodate itself to the narrow road, and strode
briskly along southward in the wake of the leaders. In a few minutes the
Hogan cabin was reached.

"There's the bunk," said Mrs. Hogan; "there's where she was; it's where
I laid her at seven o'clock; but where she is now, God only knows."

"Hand me a lantern," said Archy. He set it on the hard earth floor and
knelt by it, pretending to examine the ground closely. "Here's her
track," he said, touching the ground here and there and yonder with his
finger. "Do you see?"

Several of the company dropped upon their knees and did their best to
see. One or two thought they discerned something like a track; the
others shook their heads and confessed that the smooth hard surface had
no marks upon it which their eyes were sharp enough to discover. One
said, "Maybe a child's foot could make a mark on it, but I don't see
how."

Young Stillman stepped outside, held the light to the ground, turned
leftward, and moved three steps, closely examining; then said, "I've got
the direction--come along; take the lantern, somebody."