Twenty-four hours later we heard of him.  The Santa Barbara stage had been held up by one man.  It happened, however, that a remarkably bold and fearless driver was on the box.  The stage had been stopped upon the top of a hill, but not exactly on the crest of it.  The driver testified that the would-be robber had leaped out of a clump of manzanita, just as the heavy, lumbering coach was beginning to roll down the steep hill in front of it.  To pull up at such a moment was difficult.  The driver saw his chance and took it.  He lashed the leaders and charged straight at the highwayman, who jumped aside to avoid being run over, and then, being a-foot, abandoned his enterprise.  He was wearing a mask fashioned out of a gunny-sack, new overalls, and brown shoes!  That same night, at Los Olivos, a man wearing brown shoes was arrested by a deputy sheriff because he refused to give a proper account of himself; but, on being searched, a letter to the cashier of the San Lorenzo bank, signed (so ran the paragraph) by a well-known and responsible Englishman, was found in the pocket of his coat.  Whereupon he was allowed to go his ways, with many apologies from the over-zealous official.

“Johnson!” said Ajax.

“Did he hold up the stage?” I asked.

“Of course he did” replied my brother contemptuously.

After this incident, Johnson, who for a brief time had loomed so large in our imaginations, faded into a sort of wraith.  Years passed, bringing with them great changes for me.  I left California and settled in England.  I wrote a book which excited a certain amount of interest, and inspired some of my old school-fellows to renew acquaintance with me.  By this time I had forgotten Johnson.  He was part of a distant country, where the fine white dust settles thickly upon all things and persons.  In England, where the expected, so to speak, comes to five o’clock tea, such surprising individuals as Johnson appear—­if they ever do appear—­as creatures of a disordered fancy or digestive apparatus.  Once I told the story at the Scribblers’ Club to a couple of journalists.  They winked at each other, and said politely that I spun a good yarn, for an amateur!  “I never tell a story,” said the elder of my critics, “till I’ve worked out a climax.  You leave us at the top of a confounded hill in California, bang up in the clouds.”

And then the climax flitted into sight, masquerading as a barrel of claret.  The claret came from Bordeaux.  It was Leoville Poyferre, 1899.  Not a line of explanation came with it, but all charges were prepaid.  I wrote to the shippers.  A Monsieur had bought the wine and ordered it to be consigned to me.  Readers of this story will say that I ought to have thought of Johnson.  I didn’t.  I thanked effusively half a dozen persons in turn, who had not sent the claret; then, hopelessly befogged, I had the wine bottled.

However, Johnson sent the wine, for he told me so.  I had been passing a few days at Blois, and was staring at the Fragonard which hangs in the gallery of the chateau, when a languid voice said, “This is the best thing here.”