"Now, if there was a town on the face of the earth that Mr. Farnham used to hate, that town was San Francisco. It was because he hated the journey, and never wanted to take it again, that he sold his mine out in California to the English gentleman, Mr. Wildred. I wouldn't have supposed that there was a woman alive would have got him to go to San Francisco, and I used to think, too, that Mr. Farnham didn't care much for women; but no doubt the longer one lives the more one learns, and the more surprises one gets in such matters. I needn't say much about his being away from Denver for a few days, even at the office, he hinted to me; and with that we parted. Next morning early he left, and not a line have I had except a wire, merely announcing his safe arrival at the Santa Anna Hotel."
I listened in silence. Before Bennett had finished speaking my thoughts were far away–as far as San Francisco.
"By Jove!" I exclaimed aloud, with a rushing of blood to my brain that pulsed to bursting in the little veins at my temples. "The Santa Anna Hotel!"
"Do you know it, Mr. Stanton?" enquired Bennett, evidently surprised at my sudden vehemence.
"I was there once many years ago," I said. "The name has brought back an old association to my mind which I had thought was lost."
I knew now where I had seen those strange light eyes of Carson Wildred's, and what was the deed with which they had connected themselves in my mind. After all, perhaps, I had not come to America for nothing!
My memory travelled back over a space of ten years. I had then come back to San Francisco after an expedition into distant wilds with a party of friends shooting grizzlies in the Rockies. I had stopped at the Santa Anna Hotel, a small hostelry lately built, having an English landlord, and therefore greatly frequented by Englishmen.
On the night of my arrival there had been a serious disturbance in the house. Three men who had been stopping at the place got quarrelling over a game of cards which they were playing in a private parlour. Two, who were the hosts, and were entertaining the third, had set upon him with intent to kill, being accused of cheating. I and several of my friends had run out from the billiard-room, hearing a yell for help, just in time to see a man in evening dress stagger, bleeding, from the opposite door. "I'm killed! That devil has murdered me!" he exclaimed, and fell forward on his face.
At Bennett's mention of the Santa Anna Hotel the whole scene had come up before me as vividly as though it had been enacted but yesterday. The open door, showing a brilliantly-lighted interior; cards scattered on the carpet; a young man–almost a boy–standing, as if frozen with horror, by an overset table; a large bowie knife, common to the country, apparently fallen from his right hand to the floor.
At the door itself an older man, who had followed the victim, no doubt with the intention of keeping him from making an outcry or escaping into the hall. But he had been too late, and the expression of his face as he met our eyes was hideous. Though the knife had to all appearance been used by his companion, it was at him that the murdered man had pointed before he fell and died. He was the one apostrophised as "that devil" by the death-stricken wretch; and though he had had a high, aquiline nose, red hair, and bristling auburn brows that met across his forehead, the eyes had been those of Carson Wildred.