“I took a step or two towards him with the intention of speaking, when he immediately vanished, and from that day to this the hauntings have entirely ceased.”
CHAPTER V
A HAUNTED OFFICE IN DENVER
After leaving San Francisco, I visited Sacramento, where I bought a pair of braces, suspenders as they call them there, that lasted me for years. They were the very best half-dollar’s worth I ever had, and I still have the remains of them stowed away in a big trunk amongst other mementos of the long past.
I can’t imagine any city in America hotter than Sacramento in the summer, or more unpleasantly cold in the winter, apart from which there was nothing about the place that caused it to be very deeply impressed on my memory, saving that I met a man in one of the streets one day who was so exactly like an old Clifton College master called Tait that I believed it was he, and accosted him accordingly.
The man gasped at me in amazement. “Why, Jupp,” he said, “how on earth have you managed it. It’s only ten minutes since I left you eating your dinner in the Eagle Hotel on the other side of the town. Have you wings?”
The moment he spoke I knew he was not Tait, but it took me some time to convince him I was not Jupp; and when he introduced me to the latter half an hour or so later, I was not surprised, for I do not think there could have been a more striking likeness to myself, even in my own portrait.
The coincidence was all the more remarkable since there was at Clifton College, contemporary with Tait, a master named Jupp, of whose cane I had the most striking recollection. In appearance, however, the Clifton Jupp was not in the least bit like me.
This was the only adventure of note, if one may so designate it, I had during this visit to Sacramento. I went on from there to Denver, where I met one or two relatives of friends of mine in England, and did a little work as a “Free Lance” journalist. It was summer when I had last stayed in Denver, and then the intense heat, combined with an injudicious consumption of fruit and iced water, had brought on a mild attack of cholera, which left me with a none too favourable impression of the place.
But now all was changed. The weather was much cooler; I was growing acclimatised, and I did not feel altogether among strangers. Consequently my apathy vanished, and, despite the fact that my employment was anything but lucrative, I enjoyed this second stay in Denver immensely.