I think that, from the beginning, we all knew how it would end. He had always been so
quiet and conventional, although by nature an impulsive man; always so temperate and
abstemious, although a man with a quick appreciation of pleasure; always so cautious and
practical, although an imaginative man, that when, at last, one by one he loosed these
bands, and gave himself up to a life, perhaps not worse than other lives which the world
has accepted as the natural expression of their various owners, we at once decided that
the case was a hopeless one. And when one night we picked him up out of the Union
Ditch, a begrimed and weather-worn drunkard, a hopeless debtor, a self-confessed
spendthrift, and a half- conscious, maudlin imbecile, we knew that the end had come. The
wife he had abandoned had in turn deserted him; the woman he had misled had already
realized her folly, and left him with her reproaches; the associates of his reckless life,
who had used and abused him, had found him no longer of service, or even amusement,
and clearly there was nothing left to do but to hand him over to the state, and we took him
to the nearest penitential asylum. Conscious of the Samaritan deed, we went back to our
respective wives, and told his story. It is only just to say that these sympathetic creatures
were more interested in the philanthropy of their respective husbands than in its
miserable object. "It was good and kind in you, dear," said loving Mrs. Maston to her
spouse, as returning home that night he flung his coat on a chair with an air of fatigued
righteousness; "it was like your kind heart to care for that beast; but after he left that good
wife of his--that perfect saint--to take up with that awful woman, I think I'd have left him
to die in the ditch. Only to think of it, dear, a woman that you wouldn't speak to!" Here
Mr. Maston coughed slightly, colored a little, mumbled something about "women not
understanding some things," "that men were men," etc., and then went comfortably to
sleep, leaving the outcast, happily oblivious of all things, and especially this criticism,
locked up in Hangtown Jail.
For the next twelve hours he lay there, apathetic and half- conscious. Recovering from
this after a while, he became furious, vengeful, and unmanageable, filling the cell and
corridor with maledictions of friend and enemy; and again sullen, morose, and watchful.
Then he refused food, and did not sleep, pacing his limits with the incessant, feverish
tread of a caged tiger. Two physicians, diagnosing his case from the scant facts,
pronounced him insane, and he was accordingly transported to Sacramento. But on the
way thither he managed to elude the vigilance of his guards, and escaped. The alarm was
given, a hue and cry followed him, the best detectives of San Francisco were on his track,
and finally recovered his dead body--emaciated and wasted by exhaustion and fever--in
the Stanislaus Marshes, identified it, and, receiving the reward of $1,000 offered by his
surviving relatives and family, assisted in legally establishing the end we had predicted.
Unfortunately for the moral, the facts were somewhat inconsistent with the theory. A day
or two after the remains were discovered and identified, the real body of "Roger Catron,
aged 52 years, slight, iron-gray hair, and shabby in apparel," as the advertisement read,
dragged itself, travel-worn, trembling, and disheveled, up the steep slope of Deadwood
