When the latter reached the White Swan he countermanded the horses, saying he would not start till night, considering that it would be safer to travel along the dangerous portion of the route by night, when Napoleon’s spies would be less likely to be on the alert, and remained in the inn writing and burning papers. At seven o’clock he dismissed his guard, and ordered the horses to be ready at nine. He stood outside the inn, watching his portmanteau being replaced in the carriage, stepped round to the heads of the horses, and disappeared for ever. After Bathurst’s disappearance had been realized—which was not for some time—every effort was made to discover what had become of him. The next morning the river was dragged, outhouses, woods, marshes, ditches were examined, but not a trace could be found; nor was any trace ever found, except that nearly three weeks later—December 16—two poor women, gathering sticks in a wood, found a pair of breeches which were unquestionably Bathurst’s. In the pocket was a paper with writing on it. Two bullet-holes were in the breeches, but no traces of blood about them, which could hardly have been the case had the bullets struck a man wearing them. The paper was a half-finished letter to Mrs. Bathurst, scratched in pencil, stating that he was afraid he would never reach England, and that his ruin would be the work of Count d’Entraigues. Large rewards were offered—£1,000 by the English Government, another £1,000 by the family, and an additional 100 Friedrichs d’or by Prince Frederick of Prussia; but all was in vain, and from that day to this the fate of Mr. Bathurst remains a mystery.[4] Footnote 4: In December 1910, some woodcutters in the forest of Quitznow, near the spot where the breeches were found, discovered a skeleton which may have been that of Bathurst. No account of Brooks’s and its history would be complete without some mention of the Fox Club—a club within a club which holds its meetings in the club-house three or four times in the course of the Parliamentary session, and whose object is to keep alive the memory of probably the most distinguished, and certainly the most popular, member who has ever belonged to Brooks’s—Charles James Fox. Owing to Fox’s love of play, some of his best friends, who would appear to have been inspired by extraordinary affection, were half-ruined in annuities, given by them as securities for him to the Jews. Annuities of Fox and his society to the value of £500,000 a year were at one time advertised to be sold. Walpole wondered what Fox would do when he had sold the estates of all his friends.