"Dick Clapp!" said he, "I hope you are not over here on business you are ashamed of. I swear you are Dick Clapp, and I went to school with you and your brother James, and your sisters Mary, Adeline, and Isabella, in the good old town of Putney. Now, if you are here up to anything you ought to be ashamed of, you should have given me the wink when you denied yourself, and not acted so like a d—d hog."
There was no mistaking the American's conviction that he knew Mr. Clapp, and Mr. Edward Hague called the man aside, and told him what this Mr. Frederic Hague had come over for. The American was indignant, and offered to prove Clapp's identity at his own expense; said he would send over to America for witnesses to come out, and identify him, and then went and told Clapp he had better get out of the country as soon as he could, or he would expose him through the press of the United States. Clapp defied him; but it was too evident to all present that he was an impostor, and it is supposed that when Mr. Rogers came to hear of the fact, he felt as if the Yankee lawyer had been too shrewd for him.
It afterwards appeared that Rogers had not been carrying on the correspondence with the lawyer he supposed to be his correspondent. Some other lawyer had assumed the real lawyer's name, and given it an initial letter of a middle name. The London friend had not discovered or thought of this, and was himself imposed upon (he who commended the Yankee lawyer to Mr. Rogers). So when Mr. Rogers afterwards instituted proceedings against a certain Vermont lawyer to recover the amount of the swindle, he found he had been dealing with some other man—an "unknown" and unknowable.
Clapp got out of England at his early convenience, and the search of Frederic was about being given up; but during the excitement in regard to Clapp, an account of what was going on reached an old playmate of Frederic's, living some twenty miles away from where Mr. Edward Hague lived, and this man remembered that one time, when he and Edward, as boys of about eight years of age, were playing in the loft of an old carriage-house, Edward, jumping from a beam, had got his foot entangled in something, and fell slantingly upon the teeth of a kind of hatchel,—and terribly lacerated the flesh on the back portion of his left shoulder, tearing the flesh, in fact, nearly off from the scapular bone. This wound, he said, left great scars. He had, in after years, frequently been bathing with Frederic, and knew that he must bear these scars for life. He therefore wrote to Mr. Edward Hague that Frederic could be identified by that "private mark," and Mr. Edward gave publicity to the fact, and quite a number of people then called the facts to mind.
It so happened that in the correspondence Mr. Rogers had heard of a man in Missouri who said he was the Frederic Hague, and gave a pretty good account of matters before he left England, and had told Mr. Rogers's correspondent, a lawyer, of this very incident of the injury in the carriage-house, and stated that he had borne the scars of it all his life since. This had been communicated to Rogers, but the lawyer had added, in his letter, that, on the whole, he did not believe the man's story; that he had, as near as he could learn, been a gambler; had lived much, too, among the Indians; was a drunkard, and much broken down, and quite incoherent in his memory. Still he sometimes thought that he was, after all, the Frederic Hague so much wanted, but he could not conscientiously advise Mr. Rogers to spend any money on him.
When the fact of Frederic's "private mark" was called to mind, Rogers again took heart, and searched his papers for the lawyer's letters, but they could not be found. He fancied to himself that perhaps some secret emissary of Edward Hague had been rifling his papers, and he got into torrents of anger over it, till at last he swore he would trust no man, and would go out to America himself to find Frederic Hague, "and restore him to his lawful rights." His friends remonstrated, pointed him to the perils of the sea, the sickly character of a great portion of our Western States, etc.; but the hardy old man, for he was getting beyond middle age now, would hear to none of them. He made his will, left his affairs in good hands, and out to America he came, and it was three days after his arrival that I made his acquaintance. He could remember neither the Missouri lawyer's name nor that of his post office, and it was suggested to Mr. Rogers by an English friend, whom he found residing in New York, and who had been here long enough to learn that there is a difference between the vast extent of the United States and the confined area of England, that he had better employ a man to "pilot" him about the country, especially in the great West; and it chanced that, through an acquaintance of mine, to whom Mr. Rogers's want was made known, I was hit upon as the proper individual to consult, and Mr. Rogers and his friend called on me, and made known his business, giving me a good part of this story as I have detailed it. Other parts I, of course, obtained from others, for he did not, at first, let me into the secret of his present hatred of, and his former love for, Edward Hague. He was here as a sort of messenger of justice, as he would have me believe,—and as I did for a long time believe,—making pure self-sacrifices in the cause of right, to restore a man to his rightful possessions, and "see justice triumph."
We soon got ready, and started off for St. Louis, I having concluded that the best thing to be done was to hunt up that lawyer,—Mr. Rogers's correspondent,—and to go on to the ground, and find out the names of as many lawyers as I could, trusting to Mr. Rogers's memory to recollect the name if he should hear it; and we were in due time the guests of the Planter's Hotel, and went at once to prosecuting our inquiries. I proceeded to find the assistant clerk of the Supreme Court,—an old man, who had, since the territorial days of Missouri, done service as a court clerk, and knew almost everybody of any note in the State.
He gave us the names of all the lawyers in St. Louis, and in the adjoining counties,—Jefferson, St. Charles, Pike, Crawford, Franklin, Warren, etc., lists of which he chanced to have; and then named to us all the lawyers in other parts of the State whom he had chanced to know; but Mr. Rogers recognized none of them as his correspondent, and after a day spent in this sort of search, we returned to our hotel, and eventually sought our beds.
Finally, I was aroused out of a two hours' slumber by a servant, who told me that Mr. Rogers wanted me to get up, and come at once to his room.
"Has he a fit?" I asked, fearful that the old fellow had got desponding over our ill success, and worked himself into a fever, or something else.