University of Virginia Library

29. CHAPTER XXIX.
A LOST TRAIL.

It was June when I reached London. Business,
not fashion, was my object. I wished to
be at a convenient centre of that mighty huddle
of men and things; so I drove to Smorley's
Hotel, Charing Cross.

In America, landlords dodge personal responsibility.
They name their hotels after men of
letters, statesmen, saints, and other eminent parties.
Guests will perhaps find a great name
compensation for infinitesimal comfort.

They do these things differently in England.
Smorley does not dodge. Not Palmerston, nor
Wordsworth, nor Spurgeon, is emblazoned in
smoky gold on Smorley's sign; but Smorley.
Curses or blessings, therefore, Smorley himself
gets them. Nobody scowls at the sirloin, and
grumbles, sotto voce, “Palmerston has cut it
too fat to-day”; nobody tosses between the sheets
and prays, “O Wordsworth, why didst thou begrudge
me the Insect-Exterminator?” Nobody
complains, “Spurgeon's beer is all froth, and

small at that.” Smorley, and Smorley alone,
gets credit for beef, beds, and beer.

Smorley's Hotel stands at the verge of the East,
and looks toward the West End of London. The
Strand passes by its side, so thick with men,
horses, and vehicles, that only a sharp eye viewing
it from above detects the pavement. The
mind wearies with the countless throng, going
and coming in that narrow lane, and turns to
look on the permanent features of Smorley's
landscape.

The chief object in the view is a certain second-rate
square, named to commemorate a certain
first-rate victory. But the square, second-rate
though it be, is honored by a first-rate railing, a
balustrade of bulky granite, which may be valuable
for defence when Crapaud arrives to avenge
Trafalgar. Inside the stone railing, which is further
protected by a barricade of cabs, with drivers
asleep and horses in nose-bags, are sundry very
large stone fountains, of very smoky granite,
trickling with very small trickles of water, which
channel the basins as tears channel the face of a
dirty boy. The square is on a slope, and seems
to be sliding away, an avalanche of water-basins,
cabs, and balustrade, from a certain very ugly
edifice, severely classic in some spots, classic as a
monkish Latin ballad in others, and well sprouted
at the top with small sentry-boxes, perhaps shelters

for sharp-shooters, should anybody venture to
look mustard at the building. A bronze horseman,
on a bronze horse sixteen hands high, is at
work at the upper corner of the square, trying to
drive it down hill. A bronze footman, on a column
sixteen hundred feet high, or thereabouts,
stands at the foot of the square, hailing that fugacious
enclosure from under a nautical cocked
hat to do its duty, as England expects everything
English will, and not to run away from the ugly
edifice above.

Such is the square at the very centre of the
centre of the world, as I saw it from Smorley's
corner window, while dining in the June twilight,
the evening of my arrival in London.

I sat after dinner looking complacently out upon
the landscape. A man never attains to that
stolidity of content except in England, where the
air's exciting oxygen is well weakened with fog,
and the air's exhilarating ozone is quite discharged
from dancing attendance. London and
England were not strange to me; but a great city
is ever new, and after two years' inane staring at
a quartz-mine, town and townsfolk were still
lively contrast to my mind.

I was quietly entertaining myself, sipping
meanwhile my pint of Port, — Fine old Crusty,
it was charged in the bill, when I saw coming
down St. Martin's Lane, between the cabs and

the balustrade of the square, two gentlemen I
knew.

Brent and Biddulph! Biddulph, surely.
There could be no mistaking that blonde, manly
giant, relapsed again into modified Anglicism of
dress; but walking freely along, with a step that
remembered the prairie.

But that pale, feeble fellow hanging on the
other's arm! Could that be John Brent? He
was slouching along, looking upon the ground,
a care-worn, dejected man. It cost me a sharp
pang to see my brilliant friend so vanquished
by a sorrow I could comprehend.

I sprang up, snatched my hat, and rushed out.
Eight quiet men, dining systematically at eight
tables in the coffee-room, were startled at a rapidity
of movement quite unknown to the precincts
of Smorley, and each of the eight choked
over his mouthful, were it ox-tail, salmon, mutton,
bread, or Fine old Crusty. Eight waiters, caught
in the act of saying “Yessir! D'rectly Sir!”
were likewise shocked into momentary paralysis.

I dashed across the street, knocking the nose-bag
off the forlorn nose of a hungry cab-horse,
and laid my hand on my friend's shoulder. He
turned, in the hasty, nervous manner of a man
who is expecting something, and excited with
waiting.

“I was half inclined to let you pass,” said I.

“You have not written. I had no right to suppose
you alive.”

“I could only write to pain you and myself.
I have not found her. I am hardly alive. I
shall not long be.”

“Come,” said Biddulph, with his old friendly,
cheery manner; “now that Wade has joined us,
we will have a fresh start, and better luck. Walk
on with us, Wade, and Brent will tell you what
we have been doing.”

“Why should I tire him with the weary story
of a fruitless search?” said Brent.

It was the same utterly disheartened manner,
the same tone of despair, that had so affected
me that evening on the plain of Fort Bridger.
Not finding whom he sought was crushing him
now, as losing her crushed him then. But I
thought by what a strange and fearful mercy
our despair of that desolate time had been
changed to joy. Coming newly to the fact of
loss, I could not see it so darkly as it was
present to him. A great confidence awoke in
me that our old partnership renewed would prosper.
I determined not to yield to his mood.

“Your search, then, is absolutely fruitless,”
said I. “Well, if she is not dead, she must
have forgotten us?”

“Is she a woman to forget?” said Brent,
roused a little by my wilful calumny.

“Like other women, I suppose.”

“You must have forgotten the woman we
met and saved, and had for our comrade, to
think so.”

I rejoiced at the indignation I had stirred.

“Why, then, has she never written?” I queried.

“I am sure as faith that she has, but that her
father has cunningly suppressed her letters.”

“The same has occurred to me. The poor
old fellow, ashamed of his Mormon life, would
very likely be unwilling that any one who knew
of it should be informed of his whereabouts.”

“He might, too, have an undiscriminating,
senile terror of any letter going to America,
lest it should set Danites upon his track, as a
renegade. He might fear that we would take
his daughter from him. There are twenty suppositions
to make. I will not accept that of
death nor of neglect.”

“No,” said Biddulph; “dead people cannot
hide away their bodies, as living can.”

“You know that they are in England?”

“They landed in Liverpool from the Screw.
There they disappeared. Biddulph took me to
Clitheroe, up to the old Hall. A noble place it
is. It is poetry to have been born there. I do
not wonder Mr. Clitheroe loved it.”

“You must go down with me, Wade, as soon

as the season is over,” said Biddulph. “I wish I
could quarter you in town. Brent is with me.
But you will dine with us every day, when you
have nothing better to do, and be at home with
us always. I can give you flapjacks and molasses,
Laramie fashion.”

“Thank you, my dear fellow!”

“You must not think,” says Brent, “that I
went up to Clitheroe even for Biron's hospitality.
We were both on the search all through the
country. We thought Mr. Clitheroe might have
betaken himself to a coal-mine again. We discovered
the very mine where he formerly worked.
They remembered him well. The older generation
of those grimy troglodytes well remembered
Gentleman Hugh and his daughter, little Lady
Ellen, and the rough fellows and their rough
wives had a hundred stories to tell of the beautiful,
gentle child, — how she had been a good angel
to them, and already a protectress to her father.
In the office, too, of the coal-mine, we found
traces of him under another name, always faithful,
honest, respected, and a gentleman. It was
interesting to have all his sad story confirmed,
just as he told it to you the night of Jake
Shamberlain's ball; but it did not help our
search. Then we enlarged its scope, and followed
out every line of travel from Liverpool
and to London, the great monster, that draws in

all, the prosperous and the ruined, the rich to
spend and the poor to beg.

“We have had some queer and some romantic
adventures in our search, eh, Brent? Some
rather comic runaways we 've overhauled,” said
Biddulph; “but we 'll tell you of them, Wade,
when we are in good spirits again, and with our
fugitives by us to hear what pains we took for
their sake.”

“And all this while you have found no trace?”
I said.

“One slight trace only,” replied my friend;
“enough to identify them disappearing among
these millions of London. We found a porter at
the Paddington station, who had seen a young
lady and an old man stepping from a third-class
carriage of a night-train. `You see, sir,' said
the man, — he evidently had a heart under his
olive corduroys, — `I marked the old gent and
the young woman, she was so daughterly with
him. I 've got a little girl of my own, and may-hap
I shall come out old and weakly, and she 'll
have to look after me. It was the gray of the
morning when the train come in. There warn't
many passengers. It was cold winter weather, —
the month of February, I should say. The
young woman, — she had dark hair, and looked
as if she was one to go through thick and thin,
— she jumped out of the carriage, where she had

been settin' all that cold night, and gave the old
gent her hand. I heard her call him “Father,”
and tell him to take care; and he had need. He
seemed to be stiff with cold. He was an old
gent, such as you don't see every day. He had
a long white beard, — a kind of swallow-tail
beard. His clothes, too, was strange. He had a
long gray top-coat, grayish and bluish, with a
cape of the same over his shoulders, and brass
buttons stamped with an eagle. A milingtary
coat it was. I used to see such coats on the
sentinels in France when I went over to dig on
the Chalong Railway. The old gent looked like
a foreigner, with his swallow-tail beard and that
milingtary coat; but there was an Englishman
under the coat, if I knows 'em. And the young
woman, sir, was English, — I don't believe there 's
any such out of Old England.'”

“It must be they,” cried I. “I saw him in
that very coat, tramping up and down like a
hunted man, beside the wagons that were to take
him from Fort Laramie.”

“You did? That completes the identification.
But what good? This was a trace of them in
London; so is a sailor's cap on a surge a token
of a sailor sunk and lying somewhere under the
gray waste of sea. We lost them again utterly.”

With such talk, we had descended from Trafalgar
Square, gone down Whitehall, turned in

at the Horse Guards, and, crossing Green Park,
had come out upon Hyde Park Corner. It was
the very top moment of the London season.
The world, all sunshine and smiles and splendor,
was eddying about the corner of Apsley House.
Piccadilly was a flood of eager, busy people. The
Park blossomed with gay crowds. But under
all this laughing surface, I saw with my mind's
eye two solitary figures slowly sinking away and
drowning drearily, — two figures solitary except
for each other, — a pale, calm woman, with gray,
steady eyes, leading a vague old man, with a
white beard and a long military surtout.

“Lost utterly!” said Brent again, as if in
answer to my thought.

“No,” said I, shaking off this despondency.
“We have seemed to lose her twice more desperately
than now. It looked darker when we
left them at Fort Bridger; much darker when
we knew that those ruffians had got time and
space the start of us; darkest of all when poor
Pumps fell dead in Luggernel Alley. Searching
in a Christian city is another thing than our
agonized chase in the wilderness.”

“A Christian city!” said Brent, with a slight
shudder. “You do not know what this Christian
city is for a friendless woman. There are
brutes here as evil and more numerous than
in all barbarism together. Many times, in my

searches up and down the foul slums of London,
I have longed to exchange their walls for the
walls of Luggernel Alley, and endure again the
frenzy of our gallop there. You think me weak,
perhaps, Wade, for my doubt of success; but
remember that I have been at this vain search
over England and on the Continent for five
months.”

“But understand, Wade,” said Biddulph,
“that we do not give it up, although we have
found no clew.”

“Give it up!” cried Brent with fervor. “I
live for that alone. When the hope ends, I
end.”

How worn he looked, “with grief that 's beauty's
canker!” Life was wasting from him, as
it ever does when man pursues the elusive and
unattained. When a man like Brent once voluntarily
concentrates all his soul on one woman,
worthy of his love, thenceforth he must have
love for daily food, or life burns dim and is a
dying flame.

“To-morrow,” said I, halting at the Park
corner, “I must be at work setting my business
in motion. I have letters to write this evening,
and a dozen of famous mechanicians to see to-morrow.
In the evening we will put our heads
together again.”

“Over my claret and a weed after it, understand,”
said Biddulph.

“Yes, I 'll try whether you can take the taste
of Missouri argee and pigtail out of my mouth.”

“You must be prepared to be made a lion
of by my mother and cousins. They know the
history of Don Fulano as well as a poet knows
the pedigree of Pegasus. I have brought tears
to many gentle eyes with the story of his martyrdom
for liberty.”

“Ah, Fulano! if we only had him here! He
would know how to aid us.”

I left them, and walked down Piccadilly to
Smorley's. Some of the eight waiters, who had
seen me bolt, still regarded me with affright.
I wrote my letters and went to bed.

My brain was still rolling in my skull with
the inertia of its sea voyage. The blur and
bustle of London perplexed me. I slept; but
in my worried sleep I seemed to hear, above
the roar in the streets, a far-away scream of a
woman, as I had heard it in the pause of the
gale at Fort Bridger. Then I seemed to have
unhorsed the Iron Duke from his seat at Hyde
Park Corner, and, mounted in his place and
armed with the Nelson Column for a lance, to
be charging along the highways and by-ways of
London in chase of two dim, flying figures, — a
lady pale as death, and a weary man in a long
gray surtout.