Yours very truly,
Lansing Burroughs,
Pastor of the First Baptist Church, Bordentown, N. J. Late captain Confederate States Artillery.
Now it was just like Russell that an account of him, published in a short-lived magazine, of a purely local circulation, out in Illinois, should in some inscrutable way have fallen into the hands of the editor of a little country paper in New Jersey; that this editor should have copied it into his paper; and that one of his readers should happen to be the one other man in existence who was puzzling over the questions with which the sketch ended.
But this was not all. There was still another coincidence. There was that in my correspondent’s letter which revealed to me a fact of which he was apparently unconscious; namely, that this Reverend Lansing Burroughs was an old college mate of my own, whom I had not seen or heard from for sixteen years. Such a coincidence was altogether natural and proper, however, growing as it did out of matters connected with Russell.
I had some further correspondence with the Reverend Mr. Burroughs, and finally we met by appointment and went to Mouquin’s for luncheon and to compare notes. A careful analysis of dates proved beyond doubt that his Russell was my Russell. But our experiences were of a very different sort. Mr. Burroughs had never once had a meeting with the mysterious man which did not bring calamity of some sort upon himself. So far as I was concerned, no ill beyond annoyance and embarrassment had ever come of my acquaintance with him.
The Reverend Mr. Burroughs declares to me his firm conviction that the quiet, singularly shy, well-behaved, modest gentleman, so unusually gifted, especially in the way of a phenomenal genius for lying, is in plain terms THE DEVIL.
As to this, Mr. Burroughs is by profession an expert, and I am not. I therefore venture no opinion. I merely continue to ask, “Who is Russell?”
“JUANITA”
I WAS on guard one night in the autumn of 1861.
It was only ordinary camp guard and not picket duty.