entitled the “Wide West.” There was a shaft sixty or seventy feet deep
on the under side of the croppings, and everybody was acquainted with the
rock that came from it–and tolerably rich rock it was, too, but nothing
extraordinary. I will remark here, that although to the inexperienced
stranger all the quartz of a particular “district” looks about alike, an
old resident of the camp can take a glance at a mixed pile of rock,
separate the fragments and tell you which mine each came from, as easily
as a confectioner can separate and classify the various kinds and
qualities of candy in a mixed heap of the article.
All at once the town was thrown into a state of extraordinary excitement.
In mining parlance the Wide West had “struck it rich!” Everybody went to
see the new developments, and for some days there was such a crowd of
people about the Wide West shaft that a stranger would have supposed
there was a mass meeting in session there. No other topic was discussed
but the rich strike, and nobody thought or dreamed about anything else.
Every man brought away a specimen, ground it up in a hand mortar, washed
it out in his horn spoon, and glared speechless upon the marvelous
result. It was not hard rock, but black, decomposed stuff which could be
crumbled in the hand like a baked potato, and when spread out on a paper
exhibited a thick sprinkling of gold and particles of “native” silver.
Higbie brought a handful to the cabin, and when he had washed it out his
amazement was beyond description. Wide West stock soared skywards. It
was said that repeated offers had been made for it at a thousand dollars
a foot, and promptly refused. We have all had the “blues”–the mere sky-
blues–but mine were indigo, now–because I did not own in the Wide West.
The world seemed hollow to me, and existence a grief. I lost my
appetite, and ceased to take an interest in anything. Still I had to
stay, and listen to other people’s rejoicings, because I had no money to
get out of the camp with.
The Wide West company put a stop to the carrying away of “specimens,” and
well they might, for every handful of the ore was worth a sun of some
consequence. To show the exceeding value of the ore, I will remark that
a sixteen-hundred-pounds parcel of it was sold, just as it lay, at the
mouth of the shaft, at one dollar a pound; and the man who bought it
“packed” it on mules a hundred and fifty or two hundred miles, over the
mountains, to San Francisco, satisfied that it would yield at a rate that
would richly compensate him for his trouble. The Wide West people also
commanded their foreman to refuse any but their own operatives permission
to enter the mine at any time or for any purpose. I kept up my “blue”
meditations and Higbie kept up a deal of thinking, too, but of a
different sort. He puzzled over the “rock,” examined it with a glass,
inspected it in different lights and from different points of view, and
after each experiment delivered himself, in soliloquy, of one and the
same unvarying opinion in the same unvarying formula:
“It is not Wide West rock!”
He said once or twice that he meant to have a look into the Wide West
shaft if he got shot for it. I was wretched, and did not care whether he
got a look into it or not. He failed that day, and tried again at night;
failed again; got up at dawn and tried, and failed again. Then he lay in
ambush in the sage brush hour after hour, waiting for the two or three
hands to adjourn to the shade of a boulder for dinner; made a start once,
but was premature–one of the men came back for something; tried it
again, but when almost at the mouth of the shaft, another of the men rose
up from behind the boulder as if to reconnoitre, and he dropped on the
ground and lay quiet; presently he crawled on his hands and knees to the