find no gold this time, you are delighted again, because you know you are
on the right scent.
You lay an imaginary plan, shaped like a fan, with its handle up the
hill–for just where the end of the handle is, you argue that the rich
deposit lies hidden, whose vagrant grains of gold have escaped and been
washed down the hill, spreading farther and farther apart as they
wandered. And so you proceed up the hill, washing the earth and
narrowing your lines every time the absence of gold in the pan shows that
you are outside the spread of the fan; and at last, twenty yards up the
hill your lines have converged to a point–a single foot from that point
you cannot find any gold. Your breath comes short and quick, you are
feverish with excitement; the dinner-bell may ring its clapper off, you
pay no attention; friends may die, weddings transpire, houses burn down,
they are nothing to you; you sweat and dig and delve with a frantic
interest–and all at once you strike it! Up comes a spadeful of earth
and quartz that is all lovely with soiled lumps and leaves and sprays of
gold. Sometimes that one spadeful is all–$500. Sometimes the nest
contains $10,000, and it takes you three or four days to get it all out.
The pocket-miners tell of one nest that yielded $60,000 and two men
exhausted it in two weeks, and then sold the ground for $10,000 to a
party who never got $300 out of it afterward.
The hogs are good pocket hunters. All the summer they root around the
bushes, and turn up a thousand little piles of dirt, and then the miners
long for the rains; for the rains beat upon these little piles and wash
them down and expose the gold, possibly right over a pocket. Two pockets
were found in this way by the same man in one day. One had $5,000 in it
and the other $8,000. That man could appreciate it, for he hadn’t had a
cent for about a year.
In Tuolumne lived two miners who used to go to the neighboring village in
the afternoon and return every night with household supplies. Part of
the distance they traversed a trail, and nearly always sat down to rest
on a great boulder that lay beside the path. In the course of thirteen
years they had worn that boulder tolerably smooth, sitting on it. By and
by two vagrant Mexicans came along and occupied the seat. They began to
amuse themselves by chipping off flakes from the boulder with a sledge-
hammer. They examined one of these flakes and found it rich with gold.
That boulder paid them $800 afterward. But the aggravating circumstance
was that these “Greasers” knew that there must be more gold where that
boulder came from, and so they went panning up the hill and found what
was probably the richest pocket that region has yet produced. It took
three months to exhaust it, and it yielded $120,000. The two American
miners who used to sit on the boulder are poor yet, and they take turn
about in getting up early in the morning to curse those Mexicans–and
when it comes down to pure ornamental cursing, the native American is
gifted above the sons of men.
I have dwelt at some length upon this matter of pocket mining because it
is a subject that is seldom referred to in print, and therefore I judged
that it would have for the reader that interest which naturally attaches
to novelty.
CHAPTER LXI.
One of my comrades there–another of those victims of eighteen years of
unrequited toil and blighted hopes–was one of the gentlest spirits that
ever bore its patient cross in a weary exile: grave and simple Dick
Baker, pocket-miner of Dead-House Gulch.–He was forty-six, gray as a
rat, earnest, thoughtful, slenderly educated, slouchily dressed and clay-
soiled, but his heart was finer metal than any gold his shovel ever
brought to light–than any, indeed, that ever was mined or minted.
Whenever he was out of luck and a little down-hearted, he would fall to
mourning over the loss of a wonderful cat he used to own (for where women