containing the dissolved silver and the silver returns to palpable form
again and sinks to the bottom. Nothing now remains but to weigh it; then
the proportions of the several metals contained in the brick are known,
and the assayer stamps the value of the brick upon its surface.
The sagacious reader will know now, without being told, that the
speculative miner, in getting a “fire-assay” made of a piece of rock from
his mine (to help him sell the same), was not in the habit of picking out
the least valuable fragment of rock on his dump-pile, but quite the
contrary. I have seen men hunt over a pile of nearly worthless quartz
for an hour, and at last find a little piece as large as a filbert, which
was rich in gold and silver–and this was reserved for a fire-assay! Of
course the fire-assay would demonstrate that a ton of such rock would
yield hundreds of dollars–and on such assays many an utterly worthless
mine was sold.
Assaying was a good business, and so some men engaged in it,
occasionally, who were not strictly scientific and capable. One assayer
got such rich results out of all specimens brought to him that in time he
acquired almost a monopoly of the business. But like all men who achieve
success, he became an object of envy and suspicion. The other assayers
entered into a conspiracy against him, and let some prominent citizens
into the secret in order to show that they meant fairly. Then they broke
a little fragment off a carpenter’s grindstone and got a stranger to take
it to the popular scientist and get it assayed. In the course of an hour
the result came–whereby it appeared that a ton of that rock would yield
$1,184.40 in silver and $366.36 in gold!
Due publication of the whole matter was made in the paper, and the
popular assayer left town “between two days.”
I will remark, in passing, that I only remained in the milling business
one week. I told my employer I could not stay longer without an advance
in my wages; that I liked quartz milling, indeed was infatuated with it;
that I had never before grown so tenderly attached to an occupation in so
short a time; that nothing, it seemed to me, gave such scope to
intellectual activity as feeding a battery and screening tailings, and
nothing so stimulated the moral attributes as retorting bullion and
washing blankets–still, I felt constrained to ask an increase of salary.
He said he was paying me ten dollars a week, and thought it a good round
sum. How much did I want?
I said about four hundred thousand dollars a month, and board, was about
all I could reasonably ask, considering the hard times.
I was ordered off the premises! And yet, when I look back to those days
and call to mind the exceeding hardness of the labor I performed in that
mill, I only regret that I did not ask him seven hundred thousand.
Shortly after this I began to grow crazy, along with the rest of the
population, about the mysterious and wonderful “cement mine,” and to make
preparations to take advantage of any opportunity that might offer to go
and help hunt for it.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
It was somewhere in the neighborhood of Mono Lake that the marvellous
Whiteman cement mine was supposed to lie. Every now and then it would be
reported that Mr. W. had passed stealthily through Esmeralda at dead of
night, in disguise, and then we would have a wild excitement–because he
must be steering for his secret mine, and now was the time to follow him.
In less than three hours after daylight all the horses and mules and
donkeys in the vicinity would be bought, hired or stolen, and half the
community would be off for the mountains, following in the wake of
Whiteman. But W. would drift about through the mountain gorges for days
together, in a purposeless sort of way, until the provisions of the
miners ran out, and they would have to go back home. I have known it
reported at eleven at night, in a large mining camp, that Whiteman had