e, 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 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!

With the very word upon his lips, he threw himself, face downwards, on
the ground beneath it, and, w