SanFrancisco, 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.