Mrs. Skagg's Husbands and Other Stories. Bret Harte

‘im down to the ‘sylum in Stockton. He’z quiet and peaceable, but the insides don’t like to ride with him. Hev you enny objection to give him a lift on the box beside you?’ I sez, ‘No; put him up.’ When I came to go and get up on that box beside him, that man, Tommy,—that man sittin’ there, quiet and peaceable, was—Johnson!

      “He didn’t know me, my boy,” Yuba Bill continued, rising and putting his hands on Tommy’s shoulders,—“he didn’t know me. He didn’t know nothing about you, nor Angel’s, nor the quicksilver lode, nor even his own name. He said his name was Skaggs, but I knowd it was Johnson. Thar was times, Tommy, you might have knocked me off that box with a feather; thar was times when if the twenty-seven passengers o’ that stage hed found theirselves swimming in the American River five hundred feet below the road, I never could have explained it satisfactorily to the company,—never.

      “The sheriff said,” Bill continued hastily, as if to preclude any interruption from the young man,—“the sheriff said he had been brought into Murphy’s Camp three years before, dripping with water, and sufferin’ from perkussion of the brain, and had been cared for generally by the boys ‘round. When I told the sheriff I knowed ‘im, I got him to leave him in my care; and I took him to ‘Frisco, Tommy, to ‘Frisco, and I put him in charge o’ the best doctors there, and paid his board myself. There was nothin’ he didn’t have ez he wanted. Don’t look that way, my dear boy, for God’s sake, don’t!”

      “O Bill,” said Islington, rising and staggering to the window, “why did you keep this from me?”

      “Why?” said Bill, turning on him savagely,—“why? because I warn’t a fool. Thar was you, winnin’ your way in college; thar was YOU, risin’ in the world, and of some account to it; yer was an old bummer, ez good ez dead to it,—a man ez oughter been dead afore! a man ez never denied it! But you allus liked him better nor me,” said Bill, bitterly.

      “Forgive me, Bill,” said the young man, seizing both his hands. “I know you did it for the best; but go on.”

      “Thar ain’t much more to tell, nor much use to tell it, as I can see,” said Bill, moodily. “He never could be cured, the doctors said, for he had what they called monomania,—was always talking about his wife and darter that somebody had stole away years ago, and plannin’ revenge on that somebody. And six months ago he was missed. I tracked him to Carson, to Salt Lake City, to Omaha, to Chicago, to New York,—and here!”