I resigned again, and the other boys only held out one day longer.
We decided that a tunnel was not what we wanted. We wanted a ledge that
was already “developed.” There were none in the camp.
We dropped the “Monarch” for the time being.
Meantime the camp was filling up with people, and there was a constantly
growing excitement about our Humboldt mines. We fell victims to the
epidemic and strained every nerve to acquire more “feet.” We prospected
and took up new claims, put “notices” on them and gave them grandiloquent
names. We traded some of our “feet” for “feet” in other people’s claims.
In a little while we owned largely in the “Gray Eagle,” the “Columbiana,”
the “Branch Mint,” the “Maria Jane,” the “Universe,” the “Root-Hog-or-
Die,” the “Samson and Delilah,” the “Treasure Trove,” the “Golconda,” the
“Sultana,” the “Boomerang,” the “Great Republic,” the “Grand Mogul,” and
fifty other “mines” that had never been molested by a shovel or scratched
with a pick. We had not less than thirty thousand “feet” apiece in the
“richest mines on earth” as the frenzied cant phrased it–and were in
debt to the butcher. We were stark mad with excitement–drunk with
happiness–smothered under mountains of prospective wealth–arrogantly
compassionate toward the plodding millions who knew not our marvellous
canyon–but our credit was not good at the grocer’s.
It was the strangest phase of life one can imagine. It was a beggars’
revel. There was nothing doing in the district–no mining–no milling–
no productive effort–no income–and not enough money in the entire camp
to buy a corner lot in an eastern village, hardly; and yet a stranger
would have supposed he was walking among bloated millionaires.
Prospecting parties swarmed out of town with the first flush of dawn, and
swarmed in again at nightfall laden with spoil–rocks. Nothing but
rocks. Every man’s pockets were full of them; the floor of his cabin was
littered with them; they were disposed in labeled rows on his shelves.
CHAPTER XXX.
I met men at every turn who owned from one thousand to thirty thousand
“feet” in undeveloped silver mines, every single foot of which they
believed would shortly be worth from fifty to a thousand dollars–and as
often as any other way they were men who had not twenty-five dollars in
the world. Every man you met had his new mine to boast of, and his
“specimens” ready; and if the opportunity offered, he would infallibly
back you into a corner and offer as a favor to you, not to him, to part
with just a few feet in the “Golden Age,” or the “Sarah Jane,” or some
other unknown stack of croppings, for money enough to get a “square meal”
with, as the phrase went. And you were never to reveal that he had made
you the offer at such a ruinous price, for it was only out of friendship
for you that he was willing to make the sacrifice. Then he would fish a
piece of rock out of his pocket, and after looking mysteriously around as
if he feared he might be waylaid and robbed if caught with such wealth in
his possession, he would dab the rock against his tongue, clap an
eyeglass to it, and exclaim:
“Look at that! Right there in that red dirt! See it? See the specks of
gold? And the streak of silver? That’s from the Uncle Abe. There’s a
hundred thousand tons like that in sight! Right in sight, mind you!
And when we get down on it and the ledge comes in solid, it will be the
richest thing in the world! Look at the assay! I don’t want you to
believe me–look at the assay!”
Then he would get out a greasy sheet of paper which showed that the
portion of rock assayed had given evidence of containing silver and gold
in the proportion of so many hundreds or thousands of dollars to the ton.
I little knew, then, that the custom was to hunt out the richest piece of
rock and get it assayed! Very often, that piece, the size of a filbert,
was the only fragment in a ton that had a particle of metal in it–and