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 Hill. How he should do
it, he had long since determined,--ever since he had hidden his
Derringer, a mere baby pistol, from the vigilance of his keepers.
Where he should do it, he had settled within his mind only within
the last few moments. Deadwood Hill was seldom frequented; his
body might lie there for months before it was discovered. He had
once thought of the river, but he remembered it had an ugly way of
exposing its secrets on sandbar and shallow, and that the body of
Whisky Jim, bloated and disfigured almost beyond recognition, had
been once delivered to the eyes of Sandy Bar, before breakfast, on
the left bank of the Stanislaus. He toiled up through the chimisal
that clothed the southern slope of the hill until he reached the
bald, storm-scarred cap of the mountain, ironically decked with the
picked, featherless plumes of a few dying pines. One, stripped of
all but two lateral branches, brought a boyish recollection to his
fevered brain. Against a background of dull sunset fire, it
extended two gaunt arms--black, rigid, and pathetic. Calvary!