 CHAPTER XXI There were two men in the company who caused me particular discomfort. One was a little swede, about twenty-five years old, who knew only one song, and he was forever singing it. By day we were all crowded into one small stifling bar room, and so there was no escaping this person's music. Through all the profanity, whiskey-guzzling, old sledge, and quarreling, his monotonous song meandered with never a variation in its tiresome sameness, and it seemed to me, at last, that I would be content to die in order to be rid of the torture. The other man was a stalwart ruffian called Arkansas, who carried two revolvers in his belt and a bowie-knife projecting from his boot, and who was always drunk and always suffering for a fight. But he was so feared that nobody would accommodate him. He would try all manner of little wary rooses to entrap somebody into an offensive remark, and his face would light up now and then when he fancied he was fairly on the scent of a fight, but invariably his victim would elude his toils, and then he would show a disappointment that was almost pathetic. The landlord, Johnson, was a meek, well-meaning fellow, and Arkansas fastened on him early as a promising subject, and gave him no rest day or night for a while. On the fourth morning Arkansas got drunk and sat himself down to wait for an opportunity. Presently Johnson came in, just comfortably sociable, with whiskey, and said, I reckon the Pennsylvania election—Arkansas raised his finger impressively, and Johnson stopped. Arkansas rose unsteadily and confronted him, and said he, Why, what do you know about Pennsylvania? Answer me that. Why, what do you know about Pennsylvania? Well, I was only going to say, you was only going to say, you was, you was only going to say, what was you going to say? That's it. That's what I want to know. I want to know what. What you—what you know about Pennsylvania, since you're making yourself so d—m-free? Answer me that. Mr. Arkansas, if you'd only let me hose a hand on you, don't you'd insinuate nothing again me? Don't you do it? Don't you come in here, bullying around and cussing and going on like a lunatic? Don't you do it? Because I won't stand it. If that's what you want out with it. I'm your man, out with it. Said Johnson, backing into a corner, Arkansas, following menacingly, Why, I never said nothing, Mr. Arkansas. You don't give a man no chance. I was only going to say that Pennsylvania was going to have an election next week. That was all. That was everything I was going to say. I wish I may never stir if it wasn't. Well, then why didn't you say it? Why'd you come swelling round that way for trying to raise trouble? Well, I didn't come swelling round, Mr. Arkansas. I just—I am a liar, am I? Great Caesar's ghost! Oh, please, Mr. Arkansas, I never meant such a thing as that. I wish I may die if I did. All the boys would tell you that I've always spoke well of you, and respected you more than any man in the house. Ask Smith. Ain't it so, Smith? Didn't I say no longer golden last night that for a man that was a gentleman all the time and every way you took him, give me Arkansas? I'll leave it to any gentleman here, if them weren't the very words I used. Come now, Mr. Arkansas. Let's take a drink. Let's shake hands and take a drink. Come on, everybody. It's my treat. Come on, Bill, Tom, Bob, Scotty. Come up. I want you all to take a drink with me and Arkansas. Old Arkansas. I call him bully old Arkansas. Give me your hand again. Look at him, boys. Just take a look at him. There stands the widest man in America, and the man that denies it has got to fight me. That's all. Give me that old flipper again. They embraced, with drunken affection on the landlord's part, an unresponsive toleration on the part of Arkansas, who, bribed by a drink, was disappointed of his prey once more. But the foolish landlord was so happy to have escaped butchery that he went on talking when he ought to have marched himself out of danger. The consequence was that Arkansas shortly began to glower upon him dangerously and presently said, Landlord, will you please make that remark over again if you please? But I was saying to Scotty that my father was uppers of 80 years old when he died. Was that all that you said? Yes, that was all. Didn't say nothing but that? No, nothing. Then an uncomfortable silence. Arkansas played with his glass a moment lolling on his elbows on the counter. Then he meditatively scratched his left shin with his right boot while the awkward silence continued. But presently he loafed away toward the stove looking dissatisfied. Roughly shoulder two or three men out of a comfortable position, occupied it himself, gave a sleeping dog a kick that sent him howling under a bench, then spread his long legs and his blanket coat tails apart and proceeded to warm his back. In a little while he fell to grumbling to himself and soon he slouched back to the bar and said, Landlord, what's your idea for raking up old personalities and blowing about your father? Ain't this company agreeable to you? Ain't it? If this company ain't agreeable to you, perhaps we'd better leave. Is that your idea? Is that what you're coming at? Why, bless your soul Arkansas, I weren't thinking of such a thing. My father and my mother, Landlord, don't crowd a man. Don't do it. If nothing will do you but a disturbance out with it like a man. But don't rake up old bygones and fling them in the teeth of a parcel of people that wants to be peaceable if they could get a chance. What's the matter with you this morning, anyway? I never see a man carry on, so Arkansas, I really didn't mean no harm, and I won't go on with it if it's unpleasant to you. I reckon my liquor's got into my head and what, with the food and having so many to feed and look out for. So that's what's a wrinkle in your heart, is it? You want us to leave, do you? There's too many of us. You want us to pack up and swim. Is that it? Come. Please, be reasonable, Arkansas. Now you know I ain't the man to- Are you threatening me? Are you? By George, the man don't live that can scare me. Don't you try to come up that game, my chicken, because I can stand a good deal, but I won't stand that. Come out from behind that bar till I clean you. You want to drive us out, do you, you sneakin' underhanded hound. Come out from behind that bar. I'll learn you to bully and badger and browbeat a gentleman that's forever trying to befriend you and keep you out of trouble. Please, Arkansas, please don't shoot if there's got to be bloodshed. Hear that, gentlemen. You hear him talk about bloodshed. So it's blood you want, is it? You raven desperado. You've made up your mind to murder somebody this morning. I knowed it perfectly well. Now I'm the man, am I? It's me you're going to murder, is it? But you can't do it thou'd I get one chance first, you thieven black-hearted white-livered son of a nigger. Draw your weepin'! With that, Arkansas began to shoot, and the landlord to clamber over benches, men and every sort of obstacle in a frantic desired escape. In the midst of the wild hubbub, the landlord crashed through a glass door, and as Arkansas charged after him, the landlord's wife suddenly appeared in the doorway and confronted the desperado with a pair of scissors. Her fury was magnificent. With head erect and flashing eyes, she stood a moment and then advanced, with her weepin' raised. The astonished ruffian hesitated and then fell back a step. She followed. She backed him step by step into the middle of the bar room, and then, while the wandering crowd closed up and gazed, she gave him such another tongue-lashing as never a cout and shame-faced braggard got before, perhaps. As she finished and retired victorious, a roar of applause shook the house, and every man ordered drinks for the crowd in one and the same breath. The lesson was entirely sufficient. The reign of terror was over, and the Arkansas domination broken for good. During the rest of the season of island captivity there was one man who sat apart in a state of permanent humiliation, never mixing in any quarrel or uttering a boast and never resenting the insults the once cringing crew now constantly labelled at him. And that man was Arkansas. By the fifth or sixth morning the waters had subsided from the land, but the stream in the old river-bed was still high and swift, and there was no possibility of crossing it. On the eighth it was still too high for an entirely safe passage, but life in the inn had become next to insupperable by reason of the dirt, drunkenness, fighting, etc. So he made an effort to get away. In the midst of a heavy snowstorm we embarked in a canoe, taking our saddles aboard and towing our horses after us by their halters. The Prussian, Olandorf, was in the bow with a paddle. Blue paddled in the middle, and I sat in a stern holding the halters. When the horses lost their footing and began to swim, Olandorf got frightened, for there was great danger that the horses would make our aim uncertain, and it was plain that if we failed to land at a certain spot the current would throw us off and almost surely cast us into the main Carson, which was a boiling torrent now. Such a catastrophe would be death in all probability, for we would be swept to sea in the sink or overturned and drowned. We warned Olandorf to keep his wits about him and handle himself carefully, but it was useless. The moment the bow touched the bank he made a spring and the canoe whirled upside down in ten-foot water. Olandorf seized some brush and dragged himself ashore, but Blue and I had to swim for it and encumbered with our overcoats. But we held on to the canoe and although we were washed down nearly to Carson, we managed to push the boat ashore and make a safe landing. We were cold and water soaked, but safe. The horses made a landing too, but our saddles were gone, of course. We tied the animals in the sage brush, and there they had to stay for twenty-four hours. We bailed out the canoe and ferried over some food and blankets for them, but we slept one more night in the inn before making another venture on our journey. The next morning it was still snowing furiously when we got away with our new stock of saddles and the cootermants. We mounted and started. The snow lay so deep on the ground that there was no sign of a road perceptible, and the snowfall was so thick that we could not see more than a hundred yards ahead, else we could have guided our course by the mountain ranges. The case looked dubious, but Olandor said his instinct was as sensitive as any compass and that he could strike a B-line for Carson City and never diverge from it. He said that if he were to strangle a single point out of the true line his instinct would assail him like an outraged conscience. Consequently we dropped into his wake happy and content. For half an hour we poked along warily enough, but at the end of that time we came upon a fresh trail, and Olandor shouted proudly, I knew I was dead as certain as a compass. Boys, here we are, writing somebody's tracks that will hunt the way for us without any trouble. Let's hurry up and join company with a party. So we put the horses into as much of a trot as the deep snow would allow, and before long it was evident that we were gaining on our predecessors for the tracks grew more distinct. We hurried along, and at the end of an hour the tracks looked still newer and fresher. But what surprised us was that the number of travelers in advance of us seemed to steadily increase. We wondered how so large a party came to be traveling at such a time and in such a solitude. Somebody suggested that it must be a company of soldiers from the fort, and so we accepted that solution and jogged along a little faster still, for they could not be far off now. But the tracks still multiplied and we began to think the platoon of soldiers was miraculously expanding into a regimen. Baloo said they had already increased to five hundred. Presently he stopped his horse and said, Boys, these are our own tracks, and we've actually been circusing around and round in a circle for more than two hours out here in this blind desert. By George this is perfectly hydraulic. Then the old man waxed wroth and abusive. He called Ollendorf all manner of hard names. Said he never saw such a lurid fool as he was, and ended with a peculiarly venomous opinion that he did not know as much as a logarithm. We certainly had been following our own tracks. Ollendorf and his mental compass were in disgrace from that moment. After all our hard travel, here we were on the bank of the stream again, with the inn beyond dimly outlined through the driving snowfall. While we were considering what to do, the young Swede landed from the canoe and took his pedestrian way Carson words, singing his same tiresome song about his sister and his brother, and the child in the grave with its mother, and in a short minute faded and disappeared in the white oblivion. He was never heard of again. He no doubt got bewildered and lost, and fatigue delivered him over to sleep, and sleep betrayed him to death. Possibly he followed our treacherous tracks till he became exhausted and dropped. Presently the overland stage forwarded the now fast receding stream, and started toward Carson on its first trip since the flood came. We hesitated no longer now, but took up our march in its wake, and trotted merrily along, for we had good confidence in the driver's bump of locality. But our horses were no match for the fresh-stage team. We were soon left out of sight. But it was no matter, for we had the deep ruts of the wheels made for a guide. By this time it was three in the afternoon, and consequently it was not very long before night came, and not with a lingering twilight, but with a sudden shutting down like a cellar door, as is its habit in that country. The snowfall was still as thick as ever, and of course we could not see fifteen steps before us. But all about us, the white glare, the snow-bed enabled us to discern the smooth sugar-loaf mounds made by the covered sage-bushes, and just in front of us the two faint grooves which we knew were the steadily filling and slowly disappearing wheel-tracks. Now those sage-brushes were all about the same height, three or four feet. They stood just about seven feet apart, and all over the vast desert. Each of them was a mere snow-mound. Now, in any direction that you proceeded, the same as in a well-laid out orchard, you would find yourself moving down a distinctly defined avenue, with a row of these snow-mounds on either side of it, an avenue the customary width of a road, nice and level in its breadth, and rising at the sides in the most natural way by reason of the mounds. But we had not thought of this. Then imagine the chilly thrill that shot through us when it finally occurred to us, far in the night, but since the last faint trace of the wheel-tracks had long ago been buried from sight, we might now be wandering down a mere sage-brush avenue, miles away from the road and diverging further and further away from it all the time. Having a cake of ice slipped down one's back as placid comfort compared to it, there was a sudden leap and stir of blood that had been asleep for an hour, and as sudden a rousing of all the drowsing activities in our minds and bodies, we were alive and awake at once, and shaking and quaking with consternation, too. There was an instant halting and dismounting, a bending low and an anxious scanning of the road-bed. Useless, of course, for if a faint depression could not be discerned from an altitude of four or five feet above it, it certainly could not, with one's nose nearly against it. We seemed to be in a road, but that was no proof. We tested this by walking off in various directions. The regular snow mounds and the regular avenues between them convinced each man that he had found the true road, and that the others had found only false ones. Plainly the situation was desperate. We were cold and stiff, and the horses were tired. We decided to build a sage-brush fire and camp out till morning. This was wise, because if we were wandering from the right road and the snowstorm continued another day our case would be the next thing to hopeless if we kept on. All agreed that a campfire was what would come nearest to saving us now, and so we set about building it. We could find no matches, and so we tried to make shift with the pistols. Not a man in the party had ever tried to do such a thing before, but not a man in the party doubted that it could be done. And without any trouble, because every man in the party had read about it in books many a time and had naturally come to believe it with trusting simplicity, just as he had long ago accepted and believed that other common book fraud about Indians and lost hunters, making a fire by rubbing two dry sticks together. We huddled together on our knees in the deep snow, and the horses put their noses together and bowed their patient heads over us. And while the feathery flakes eddyed down and turned us into a group of white statuary, we proceeded with the momentous experiment. We broke twigs from a sage-bush and piled them on a little cleared place in the shelter of our bodies. In the course of ten or fifteen minutes, all was ready. And then, while conversation ceased and our pulses beat low with anxious suspense, Olandorf applied his revolver, pulled the trigger and blew the pile clear out of the county. It was the flattest failure that ever was. This was distressing, but it paled before a great horror. The horses were gone. I had been appointed to hold the bridles, but in my absorbing anxiety over the pistol experiment I had unconsciously dropped them and the released animals had walked off in the storm. It was useless to try to follow them, for their footfalls could make no sound, and one could pass within two yards of the creatures and never see them. We gave them up without an effort at recovering them, and cursed the lying books that said horses would stay by their masters for protection and companionship in a distressful time like ours. We were miserable enough before, we felt still more forlorn now. Patiently but with blighted hope, we broke more sticks and piled them, and once more the Prussian shot them into annihilation. Plainly, to light a fire with a pistol was an art requiring patience and experience, and the middle of a desert at midnight in a snowstorm was not a good place or time for the acquiring of the accomplishment. We gave it up and tried the other. Each man took a couple of sticks and fell to chafing them together. At the end of half an hour we were thoroughly chilled, and so were the sticks. We bitterly executed the Indians, the hunters, and the books that had betrayed us with a silly device, and wondered dismally what was next to be done. This critical moment Mr. Balu fished out four matches from the rubbish of an overlooked pocket. To have found four gold bars would have seemed poor and cheap good luck compared to this. One cannot think how good a match looks under such circumstances, or how lovable and precious and sacredly beautiful to the eye. This time we gathered sticks with high hopes, and when Mr. Balu prepared to light the first match there was an amount of interest centered upon him that pages of writing could not describe. The match burned, hopefully a moment, and then went out. It could not have carried more regret with it than if it had been a human life. The next match simply flashed and died. The wind puffed the third one out, just as it was on the imminent verge of success. We gathered together closer than ever, and developed a solicitude that was wrapped and painful as Mr. Balu scratched our last hope on his leg. It lit, turned blue and sickly, and then put it into a robust flame. Shading it with his hands, the old gentleman bent gradually down, and every heart went with him, everybody too, for that matter, and blood and breath stood still. The flame touched the sticks at last, took gradual hold upon them, hesitated, took a stronger hold, hesitated again, held its breath five heartbreaking seconds, and gave a sort of human gasp, and went out. Nobody said a word for several minutes. It was a solemn sort of silence. Even the wind put on a stealthy sinister quiet, and made no more noise than the falling flakes of snow. Finally a sad voiced conversation began, and it was soon apparent that in each of our hearts lay the conviction that this was our last night with the living. I had so hoped that I was the only one who felt so. When the others calmly acknowledged their conviction, it sounded like the summons itself. Olandorf said, Brothers, let us die together, and let us go without one hard feeling toward each other. Let us forget and forgive bygones. I know that you have felt hard toward me for turning over the canoe and for knowing too much and leading you round and round in the snow. But I meant well. Forgive me. I acknowledge freely that I have had hard feelings against Mr. Blue for abusing me and calling me a logarithm, which is a thing I do not know what, but no doubt a thing considered disgraceful and unbecoming in America, and it has scarcely been out of my mind and has hurt me a great deal. But let it go. I forgive Mr. Blue with all my heart, and poor Olandorf broke down and the tears came. He was not alone, for I was crying too, and so was Mr. Blue. Olandorf got his voice again and forgave me for things I had done and said. Then he got out his bottle of whiskey and said that, whether he lived or died, he would never touch another drop. He said he had given up all hope of life, and although ill-prepared was ready to submit humbly to his fate, that he wished he could be spared a little longer, not for any selfish reason, but to make a thorough reform in his character, and by devoting himself to helping the poor, nursing the sick, and pleading with the people to guard themselves against the evils of intemperance, make his life a beneficent example to the young, and lay it down at last with a precious reflection that had not been lived in vain. He ended by saying that his reform should begin at this moment, even here, in the presence of death, since no longer time was to be vouchsafed wherein to prosecute it to men's help and benefit, and with that he threw away the bottle of whiskey. Mr. Blue made remarks of similar purport, and began the reform he could not live to continue by throwing away the ancient pack of cards that had solaced our captivity during the flood and made it bearable. He said he never gambled, but still was satisfied that the meddling with cards in any way was immoral and injurious, and no man could be wholly pure and blemishless without eschewing them. And therefore, continued he, in doing this act I already feel more in sympathy with that spiritual Saturnalia necessary to entire and obsolete reform. These rolling syllables touched him as no intelligible eloquence could have done, and the old man sobbed with a mournfulness not unmingled with satisfaction. My own remarks were of the same tenor as those of my comrades, and I know that the feelings that prompted them were heartfelt and sincere. We were all sincere, and all deeply moved and earnest, for we were in the presence of death and without hope. I threw away my pipe, and in doing it felt that at last I was free of a hate advice and one that had ridden me like a tyrant all my days. While I yet talked, the thought of the good I might have done in the world, and the still greater good I might now do with these new incentives and higher and better aims to guide me, if I could only be spared a few years longer, overcame me, and the tears came again. We put our arms about each other's necks, and awaited the warning drowsiness that precedes death by freezing. It came, stealing over us presently, and then we bade each other a last farewell. A delicious dreaminess wrought its web about my yielding senses, while the snowflakes wove a winding sheet about my conquered body. Oblivion came. The battle of life was done. END OF CHAPTER XXXII This is Chapter XXXIII of RUFFING IT. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. RUFFING IT by Mark Twain CHAPTER XXXIII I do not know how long I was in a state of forgetfulness, but it seemed an age. A vague consciousness grew upon me by degrees, and then came a gathering anguish of pain in my limbs, and through all my body. I shuddered. The thought flitted through my brain. This is death. This is the hereafter. Then came a white upheaval at my side, and a voice said with bitterness, Will some gentleman be so good as to kick me behind? It was blue. At least it was a tuzzled snow image in a sitting posture with blue's voice. I rose up, and there in the grey dawn, not fifteen steps from us, were the frame buildings of a stage station, and under a shed stood our still saddled and bridled horses. An arch snowdrift broke up now, and Olandorfer merged from it, and the three of us sat and stared at the houses without speaking a word. We really had nothing to say. We were like the profane man who could not do the subject justice. The whole situation was so painfully ridiculous and humiliating that words were tame, and we did not know where to commence anyhow. The joy in our hearts at our deliverance was poisoned. Well, and I dissipated indeed. We presently began to grow petish by degrees and sullen, and then angry at each other, angry at ourselves, angry at everything in general. We moodily dusted the snow from our clothing, and in unsociable single file plowed our way to the horses, unsaddled them, and sought shelter in the station. I have scarcely exaggerated a detail of this curious and absurd adventure. It occurred almost exactly as I have stated it. We actually went into camp in a snowdrift in a desert at midnight in a storm, forlorn and hopeless, within fifteen steps of a comfortable inn. For two hours we sat apart in the station and ruminated in disgust. The mystery was gone now, and it was plain enough why the horses had deserted us. Without a doubt they were under that shed a quarter of a minute after they had left us, and they must have overheard and enjoyed all our confessions and lamentations. After breakfast we felt better, and the zest of life soon came back. The world looked bright again, and existence was as dear to us as ever. Presently an uneasiness came over me, grew upon me, assailed me without ceasing. Alas my regeneration was not complete. I wanted to smoke. I resisted with all my strength, but the flesh was weak. I wandered away alone and wrestled with myself an hour. I recalled my promises of reform, and preached to myself persuasively, operatingly, exhaustively. But it was all vain. I shortly found myself sneaking among the snowdrifts, hunting for my pipe. I discovered it after a considerable search, and crept away to hide myself and enjoy it. I remained behind the barn a good while asking myself how I would feel if my braver, stronger, truer comrades should catch me in my degradation. At last I lit the pipe, and no human being can feel meaner and baser than I did then. I was ashamed of being in my own pitiful company. Still dreading discovery I felt that perhaps the further side of the barn would be somewhat safer, and so I turned the corner. As I turned the one corner, smoking, Olandorf turned the other, with his bottle to his lips, and between us sat unconscious blue deep in a game of solitaire with the old greasy cards. Absurdity could go no farther. We shook hands, and agreed to say no more about reform, and examples to the rising generation. The station we were at was at the verge of the 26-mile desert. If we had approached it half an hour earlier the night before, we must have heard men shouting there and firing pistols, for they were expecting some sheep-drovers and their flocks, and knew that they would infallibly get lost and wander out of reach of help unless guided by sounds. While we remained at the station, three of the drovers arrived, nearly exhausted with their wanderings, but two others of their party were never heard of afterward. We reached Carson in due time and took a rest. This rest, together with preparations for the journey to Esmeralda, kept us there a week, and the delay gave us the opportunity to be present at the trial of the great landslide case of Hyde v. Morgan, an episode which is famous in Nevada to this day. After a word or two of necessary explanation, I will set down the history of this singular affair just as it transpired. END OF CHAPTER XXXIII The mountains are very high and steep about Carson, Eagle and Washoo valleys, very high and very steep, and so when the snow gets to melting off fast in the spring and the warm surface earth begins to moisten and soften, the disastrous landslides commence. The reader cannot know what a landslide is unless he has lived in that country, and seen the whole side of a mountain taken off some fine morning and deposited down in the valley, leaving a vast, treeless, unsightly scar upon the mountain's front to keep the circumstance fresh in his memory all the years that he may go on living within seventy miles of that place. General Buncombe was shipped out to Nevada in the invoice of territorial officers to be United States attorney. He considered himself a lawyer of parts, and he very much wanted an opportunity to manifest it, partly for the pure gratification of it, and partly because his salary was territorially meager, which is a strong expression. Now the older citizens of a new territory look down upon the rest of the world with a calm, benevolent compassion as long as it keeps out of the way. When it gets in the way they snub it. Sometimes this latter takes the shape of a practical joke. One morning Dick Hyde rode furiously up to General Buncombe's door in Carson City and rushed into his presence without stopping to tie his horse. He seemed much excited. He told the general that he wanted him to conduct a suit for him and would pay him five hundred dollars if he achieved a victory. And then, with violent gestures and a world of profanity, he poured out his grief. He said it was pretty well known that for some years he had been farming, or ranching, as the more customary term is, in Washoo District and making a successful thing of it, and furthermore it was known that his ranch was situated just in the edge of the valley, and that Tom Morgan owned a ranch immediately above it on the mountainside. And now the trouble was that one of those hated and dreaded landslides had come and slid Morgan's ranch, fences, cabins, cattle, barns, and everything down on top of his ranch and exactly covered up every single vestige of his property, to a depth of about thirty-eight feet. Morgan was in possession and refused to vacate the premises, said he was occupying his own cabin and not interfering with anybody else's, and said the cabin was standing on the same dirt and same ranch it had always stood on, and he would like to see anybody make him vacate. And when I reminded him, said Hyde, weeping, that it was on top of my ranch and that he was trespassing, he had the infernal meanness to ask me why didn't I stay on my ranch and hold possession when I see him a-coming? Why didn't I stay on it, the blathering lunatic, by George, when I heard that racket and looked up that hill it was just like the whole world was a-rippin' and a-tearin' down that mountainside, splinters and cordwood, thunder and lightning, hail and snow, odds and ends of haystacks and awful clouds of dust, trees going end over end in the air, rocks as big as a house jumping about a thousand feet high and busting into ten million pieces, cattle turned inside out and a-coming head on with their tails hangin' out up between their teeth. And in the midst of all that rack and destruction sought that cussid Morgan on his gate post, I wonderin' why I didn't stay and hold possession. Laws bless me, I just took one glimpse, General, and lit out in the county and three jumps exactly. But what grinds me is that that Morgan hangs on there and won't move off in that ranch, says it's his and then he's gonna keep it. Likes it better than he did when it was higher up the hill. Mad. Well, I've been so mad for two days I couldn't find my way to town. Been wanderin' round in the brush in a starving condition. Got anything here to drink, General? But I'm here now and I'm a-goin' to law. You hear me? Never in all the world, perhaps, were a man's feeling so outraged as were the generals. He said he had never heard of such high-handed conduct in all his life as this Morgan's. And he said there was no use in goin' to law. Morgan had no shadow of right to remain where he was. Nobody in the wide world would uphold him in it, and no lawyer would take his case and no judge listen to it. Hyde said that right there was where he was mistaken. Everybody in town sustained Morgan. Hal Brayton, a very smart lawyer, had taken his case. The court's being in vacation, it was to be tried before a referee. And ex-Governor Roup had already been appointed to that office and would open his court in a large public hall near the hotel at two that afternoon. The general was amazed. He said he had suspected before that the people of that territory were fools, and now he knew it. But he said, rest easy, rest easy, and collect the witnesses, for the victory was just as certain as if the conflict were already over. Hyde wiped away his tears and left. A tooth in the afternoon, referee Roup's court opened, and Roup appeared thrown among his sheriffs, the witnesses, and spectators, and wearing upon his face a solemnity so awe-inspiring that some of his fellow conspirators had misgivings that maybe he had not comprehended, after all, that this was merely a joke. An unearthly stillness prevailed, for at the slightest noise the judge uttered sternly the command, Order in the court! And the sheriffs promptly echoed it. Presently the general elbowed his way through the crowd of spectators with his arms full of law-books, and on his ears fell an order from the judge which was the first respectful recognition of his high official dignity that had ever saluted them, and it trickled pleasantly through his whole system. Way for the United States' attorney! The witnesses were called, legislators, high government officers, ranchmen, miners, Indians, Chinamen, Negroes, three fours of them were called by the defendant Morgan, but no matter their testimony invariably went in favor of the plaintiff Hyde. Each new witness only added new testimony to the absurdity of a man's claiming to own another man's property because his farm had slid down on top of it. Then the Morgan lawyers made their speeches and seemed to make singularly weak ones. They did really nothing to help the Morgan cause, and now the general with exaltation in his face got up and made an impassioned effort. He pounded the table. He banged the law-books. He shouted and roared and howled. He quoted from everything and everybody, poetry, sarcasm, statistics, history, pathos, bathos, blasphemy, and wound up with a grand war-woop for free speech, freedom of the press, free schools, the glorious bird of America, and the principles of eternal justice. Applauds. When the general sat down, he did it with a conviction that if there was anything in good, strong testimony, a great speech and believing and admiring countenances all around, Mr. Morgan's case was killed. Ex-Governor Roup lent his head upon his hand for some minutes, thinking, and the still audience waited for his decision. Then he got up and stood erect with bended head and thought again. Then he walked the floor with long, deliberate strides, his chin in his hand, and still the audience waited. At last he returned to his throne, seated himself, and began impressively, gentlemen, I feel the great responsibility that rests upon me this day. This is no ordinary case. On the contrary, it is plain that it is the most solemn and awful that ever man was called upon to decide. Gentlemen, I have listened attentively to the evidence, and have perceived that the weight of it, the overwhelming weight of it, is in favor of the plaintive hide. I have listened also to the remarks of counsel with high interest, and especially will I commend the masterly and irrefutable logic of the distinguished gentleman who represents the plaintive. But, gentlemen, let us beware how we allow mere human testimony, human ingenuity in argument, and human ideas of equity to influence us at a moment so solemn as this. Gentlemen, it ill becomes us, worms as we are, to meddle with the decrees of heaven. It is plain to me that heaven, in its inscrutable wisdom, has seen fit to move this defendant's ranch for a purpose. We are but creatures, and we must submit. If heaven has chosen to favor the defendant Morgan in this marked and wonderful manner, and if heaven dissatisfied with the position of the Morgan ranch upon the mountainside, has chosen to remove it to a position more eligible and more advantageous for its owner, it ill becomes us, insects as we are, to question the legality of the act, or inquire into the reasons that prompted it. No, heaven created the ranches, and it is heaven's prerogative to rearrange them, to experiment with them around at its pleasure. It is for us to submit without repining. I warn you that this thing which has happened is a thing with which the sacrilegious hands and brains and tongues of men must not meddle. Gentlemen, it is the verdict of this court that the plaintive, Richard Hyde, has been deprived of his ranch by the visitation of God, and from this decision there is no appeal. Buncombe seized his cargo of law books and plunged out of the courtroom frantic with indignation. He pronounced Rupert to be a miraculous fool, an inspired idiot. In all good faith he returned at night and remonstrated with Rupert upon his extravagant decision, and implored him to walk the floor and think for half an hour, and see if he could not figure out some sort of modification of the verdict. Rupert yielded at last and got up to walk. He walked two hours and a half, and at last his face lit up happily, and he told Buncombe it had occurred to him that the ranch underneath the new Morgan Ranch still belonged to Hyde, that his title to the ground was just as good as it had ever been, and therefore he was of the opinion that Hyde had a right to dig it out from under there, and the General never waited to hear the end of it. He was always an impatient and irascible man that way. At the end of two months the fact that he had been played upon with a joke had managed to bore itself, like another Husek Tunnel, through the solid adamant of his understanding. The Governor's brother. He had a good memory and a tongue hung in the middle. This is a combination which gives him mortality to conversation. Captain John never suffered the talk to flag or falter once during the 120 miles of the journey. In addition to his conversational powers, he had one or two other endowments of a marked character. One was a singular handiness about doing anything and everything, from laying out a railroad or organizing a political party down to sewing on buttons, shooing a horse, or setting a broken leg or a hen. Another was a spirit of accommodation that prompted him to take the needs, difficulties, and perplexities of anybody and everybody upon his own shoulders at any and all times, and dispose of them with admirable facility and alacrity. Hence, he always managed to find vacant beds and crowded inns and plenty to eat in the emptiest ladders. And finally, wherever he met a man, woman or child in camp, in or desert, he either knew such parties personally or had been acquainted with a relative of the same. Such another traveling comrade was never seen before. I cannot forbear giving a specimen of the way in which he overcame difficulties. On the second day out, we arrived very tired and hungry at a poor little inn in the desert, and were told that the house was full, no provisions on hand, and neither hay nor barley to spare for the horses. Must move on. The rest of us wanted to hurry on while it was yet light, but Captain John insisted on stopping a while. We dismounted and entered. There was no welcome for us on any face. Captain John began his accomplishments, and within twenty minutes he had accomplished the following things. These found old acquaintances and three teamsters, discovered that he used to go to school with a landlord's mother, recognized his wife as a lady whose life he had saved once in California by stopping her runaway horse, mended a child's broken toy, and won the favor of its mother a guest of the inn. Helped the hostler bleed a horse, and prescribed for another horse that had the heaves. Treated the entire party three times at the landlord's bar, produced a later paper than anybody had seen for a week, and sat himself down to read the news to a deeply interested audience. The result, summed up, was as follows. The hostler found plenty of feed for our horses. We had a trout supper, an exceedingly sociable time after it, good beds to sleep in, and a surprising breakfast in the morning. And when we left, we left lamented by all. Captain John had some bad traits, but he had some uncommonly valuable ones to offset them with. Esmeralda was in many respects another humboldt, but in a little more forward state. The claims we had been paying assessments on were entirely worthless, and we threw them away. The principal one cropped out of the top of a knoll that was fourteen feet high, and the inspired board of directors were running a tunnel under that knoll to strike the ledge. The tunnel would have to be seventy feet long, and would then strike the ledge at the same depth that a shaft twelve feet deep would have reached. The board were living on the assessments. Note bene, this hint comes too late for the enlightenment of New York silver miners. They have already learned all about this neat trick by experience. The board had no desire to strike the ledge, knowing that it was as barren of silver as a curb stone. This reminiscence calls to mind Jim Townsend's tunnel. He had paid assessments on a mine called The Daily, till he was well nipineless. Finally an assessment was levied to run a tunnel two hundred and fifty feet on the daily, and Townsend went up on the hill to look into the matters. He found The Daily cropping out of the apex of an exceedingly sharp pointed peak, and a couple of men up there facing the proposed tunnel. Townsend made a calculation. Then he said to the men, So you have taken a contract to run a tunnel into this hill two hundred and fifty feet to strike this ledge? Yes, sir. Well, do you know that you have got one of the most expensive and arduous undertakings before you that was ever conceived by man? Why, no, how is that? Because this hill is only twenty-five feet through from side to side, and so you have got to build two hundred and twenty-five feet of your tunnel on trestle work. The ways of silver mining boards are exceedingly dark and sinuous. We took up various claims, and commenced shafts and tunnels on them, but never finished any of them. We had to do a certain amount of work on each to hold it, else other parties could seize our property after the expiration of ten days. We were always hunting up new claims and doing a little work on them, and then waiting for a buyer who never came. We never found any ore that would yield more than fifty dollars a ton, and as the mills charged fifty dollars a ton for working the ore and extracting the silver, our pocket money melted steadily away, and none returned to take its place. We lived in a little cabin and cooked for ourselves, and altogether it was a hard life, though a hopeful one, for we never ceased to expect fortune and a customer to burst upon us some day. At last, when flour reached a dollar a pound and money could not be borrowed on the best security at less than eight percent a month, I being without the security, too, I abandoned mining and went to milling, that is to say I went to work as a common laborer in a quartz mill at ten dollars a week and ten dollars a month on the board. END OF CHAPTER XXXV I had already learned how hard and long and dismal a task it is to burrow down into the bowels of the earth, and get out the coveted ore, and I had learned how hard and long and dismal a task it is to burrow down into the bowels of the earth, and get out the coveted ore, and now I learned that the burrowing was only half the work, and that to get the silver out of the ore was the dreary and laborious other half of it. We had to turn out at six in the morning and keep at it till dark. This mill was a six-stamp affair driven by steam, six tall upright rods of iron, as large as a man's ankle, and heavily shot with a mass of iron and steel at their lower ends were framed together like a gate, and these rose and fell, one after the other, in a ponderous dance in an iron box called a battery. Each of these rods or stamps weighed six hundred pounds. One of us stood by the battery all day long, breaking up masses of silver bearing rock with a sledge and shoveling it into the battery. The ceaseless dance of the stamps pulverized the rock to powder, and a stream of water that trickled into the battery turned it into a creamy paste. The minutest particles were driven through a fine wire screen which fitted close round the battery and were washed into great tubs warmed by superheated steam, amalgamating pans they are called. The mass of pulp in the pans was kept constantly stirred up by revolving mullers. A quantity of quicksilver was kept always in the battery, and this seized some of the liberated gold and silver particles and held onto them. Quicksilver was shaken in a fine shower into the pans, also about every half hour, through a buckskin sack. Quantities of coarse salt and sulfate of copper were added from time to time to assist the amalgamation by destroying these base metals which coated the gold and silver and would not let it unite with the quicksilver. All these tiresome things we had to attend to constantly. Streams of dirty water flowed always from the pans, and were carried off in broad wooden troughs to the ravine. One would not suppose that atoms of gold and silver would float on top of six inches of water, but they did, and in order to catch them coarse blankets were laid in the troughs, and little obstructing ripples charged with quicksilver were placed here and there across the troughs also. These ripples had to be cleaned, and the blankets washed out every evening to get their precious accumulations, and after all this eternity of trouble one-third of the silver and gold and a ton of rock would find its way to the end of the troughs in the ravine at last and have to be worked over again some day. There is nothing so aggravating as silver mining. There never was any idle time in that mill. There was always something to do. It is a pity that Adam could not have gone straight out of Eden into a quartz mill in order to understand the full force of his doom to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. Every now and then during the day we had to scoop some pulp out of the pans and tediously wash it in a hornspoon, wash it little by little over the edge till at last nothing was left but some little dull globules of quicksilver in the bottom. If they were soft and yielding the pan needed some salt or some sulfate of copper or some other chemical rubbish to assist digestion. If they were crisp to the touch and would retain a dint they were freighted with all the silver and gold they could seize and hold and consequently the pan needed a fresh charge of quicksilver. When there was nothing else to do one could always screen tailings, that is to say he could shovel up the dried sand that had washed down to the ravine through the troughs and dash it against the upright wire screen to free it from pebbles and prepare it for working over. The process of amalgamation differed in the various mills and this included changes in the style of pans and other machinery and a great diversity of opinion existed as to the best in use but none of the methods employed involved the principle of milling or without screening the tailings. Of all recreations in the world screening tailings on a hot day with a long handle shovel is the most undesirable. At the end of the week the machinery was stopped and we cleaned up that is to say we got the pulp out of the pans and batteries and washed the mud patiently away till nothing was left but the long accumulating mass of quick silver with its imprisoned treasures. This we made into heavy compact snowballs and piled them up in a bright luxurious heat for inspection. Making these snowballs cost me a fine gold ring that and ignorance together. For the quick silver invaded the ring with the same facility with which water saturates a sponge separated its particles and the ring crumbled to pieces. We put our pile of quick silver balls into an iron retort that had a pipe leading from it to a pail of water and then applied a roasting heat. The quick silver turned to vapor escaped through the pipe into the pail and the water turned it into good wholesome quick silver again. Quick silver is very costly and they never waste it. On opening the retort there was our week's work a lump of pure white frosty looking silver twice as large as a man's head perhaps a fifth of the mass was gold but the color of it did not show would not have shown if two-thirds of it had been gold. We melted it up and made a solid brick of it by pouring it into an iron brick mold. By such a tedious and laborious process were silver bricks obtained. This mill was but one of many others in operation at the time. The first one in Nevada was built at Egan Canyon and was a small insignificant affair and compared most unfavorably with some of the immense establishments afterwards located at Virginia City and elsewhere. From our bricks a little corner was chipped off for the fire assay of method used to determine the proportions of gold silver and base metals in the mass. This is an interesting process. The chip is hammered out as thin as paper and weighed on scales so fine and sensitive that if you weigh a two inch scrap of paper on them and then write your name on the paper with a coarse soft pencil and weigh it again the scales will take marked notice of the addition. Then a little lead also weighed is rolled up with the flake of silver and the two are melted at a great heat in a small vessel called a cupel made by compressing bone ashes into a cup shape in a steel mold. The base metals oxidize and are absorbed with the lead into the pores of the cupel. A button or globule of perfectly pure gold and silver is left behind and by weighing it and noting the loss the assayer knows the proportion of base metal the brick contains. He has to separate the gold from the silver now. The button is hammered out flat and thin, put in the furnace and kept some time at a red heat. After cooling it off it is rolled up like a quill and heated in a glass vessel containing nitric acid. The acid dissolves the silver and leaves the gold pure and ready to be weighed on its own merits. Then salt water is poured into the vessel 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 a success he became an object of envy and suspicion and 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 one thousand one hundred and eighty four dollars and forty cents in silver and three hundred and sixty six dollars and thirty six cents 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. But 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 at a good round sum how much did I want. I said about four hundred thousand dollars a month and bored 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. End of Chapter 36. This is Chapter 37 of Roughing It. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer. Visit LibriVox.org. Roughing It. By Mark Twain. Chapter 37 It was somewhere in the neighborhood of Mono Lake that the marvelous 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 just passed through and in two hours the streets so quiet before would be swarming with men and animals. Every individual would be trying to be very secret but yet venturing to whisper to just one neighbor that W. had passed through. And long before daylight this in the dead of winter the stampede would be complete. The camp deserted and the whole population gone chasing after W. The tradition was that in the early immigration more than 20 years ago three young Germans, brothers who had survived an Indian massacre on the plains, wandered on foot through the deserts avoiding all trails and roads and simply holding a westerly direction and hoping to find California before they starved or died of fatigue. And in a gorge in the mountains they sat down to rest one day when one of them noticed a curious vein of cement running along the ground shot full of lumps of dull yellow metal. They saw that it was gold and that here was a fortune to be acquired in a single day. The vein was about as wide as a curbstone and fully two-thirds of it was pure gold. Every pound of the wonderful cement was worth well nigh two hundred dollars. Each of the brothers loaded himself with about twenty-five pounds of it and then they covered up all traces of the vein, made a rude drawing of the locality and the principal landmarks in the vicinity, and started westward again. But troubles thickened about them. In their wanderings one brother fell and broke his leg and the others were obliged to go on and leave him to die in the wilderness. Another, worn out and starving, gave up by and by and laid down to die. But after two or three weeks of incredible hardships the third reached these settlements of California exhausted, sick, and his mind deranged by his sufferings. He had thrown away all his cement but a few fragments, but these were sufficient to set everybody wild with excitement. However, he had had enough of the cement country and nothing could induce him to lead a party thither. He was entirely content to work on a farm for wages, but he gave Whiteman his map and described the cement region as well as he could and thus transferred the curse to that gentleman. For when I had my one accidental glimpse of Mr. W. in Esmeralda he had been hunting for the lost mine in hunger and thirst, poverty and sickness for twelve or thirteen years. Some people believed he had found it, but most people believed he had not. I saw a piece of cement as large as my fist which was said to have been given to Whiteman by the young German and it was of a seductive nature. Lumps of virgin gold were as thick in it as raisins in a slice of fruit-cake. The privilege of working such a mine one week would be sufficient for a man of reasonable desires. A new partner of ours, a Mr. Higbee, knew Whiteman well by sight and a friend of ours, a Mr. Van Dorn, was well acquainted with him and not only that, but had Whiteman's promise that he should have a private hint in time to enable him to join the next cement expedition. Van Dorn had promised to extend the hint to us. One evening Higbee came in greatly excited and said he felt certain he had recognized Whiteman uptown, disguised and in a pretended state of intoxication. In a little while Van Dorn arrived and confirmed the news and so we gathered in our cabin and with heads close together arranged our plans and impressive whispers. We were to leave town quietly after midnight in two or three small parties so as not to attract attention and meet at Dorn on the divide overlooking Mono Lake eight or nine miles distant. We were to make no noise after starting and not speak above a whisper under any circumstances. It was believed that for once Whiteman's presence was unknown in the town and his expedition unsuspected. Our conclave broke up at nine o'clock and we set about our preparation diligently and with profound secrecy. At eleven o'clock we saddled our horses, hitched them with their long riatas or lassoes, and then brought out a side of bacon, a sack of beans, a small sack of coffee, some sugar, a hundred pounds of flour and sacks, some tin cups and a coffee pot, frying pan and some few other necessary articles. All these things were packed on the back of a lead horse and whoever has not been taught by a Spanish adept to pack an animal, let him never hope to do the thing by natural smartness. That is impossible. Higbee had had some experience but was not perfect. He put on the pack saddle, a thing like a saw-buck, piled the property on it and then wound a rope all over and about it and under it every which way, taking a hitch in it every now and then and occasionally surging back on it till the horse's sides sunk in and he gasped for breath. But every time the lashings grew tight in one place they loosened in another. We never did get the load tight all over but we got it so that it would do after a fashion and then we started in single file, close order and without a word. It was a dark night. We kept the middle of the road and proceeded in a slow walk past the rows of cabins and whenever a miner came to his door I trembled for fear the light would shine on us and excited curiosity. But nothing happened. We began the long winding ascent of the canyon toward the divide and presently the cabins began to grow infrequent and the intervals between them wider and wider and then I began to breathe tolerably freely and feel less like a thief and a murderer. I was in the rear leading the pack horse. As the ascent grew steeper he grew proportionately less satisfied with his cargo and began to pull back on his Riata occasionally and delay progress. My comrades were passing out a sight in the gloom. I was getting anxious. I coaxed and bullied the pack horse till I presently got him into a trot and then the tin cups and pans strung about his person frightened him and he ran. His Riata was wound around the pummel of my saddle and so as he went by he dragged me from my horse and the two animals traveled briskly on without me. But I was not alone. The loosened cargo tumbled overboard from the pack horse and fell close to me. It was a breast of almost the last cabin. A miner came out and said, Hello! I was thirty steps from him and knew he could not see me. It was so very dark in the shadow of the mountain. So I lay still. Another had appeared in the light of the cabin door and presently the two men walked toward me. They stopped within ten steps of me and one said, Sh! Listen! I could not have been in a more distressed state if I had been escaping justice with a price on my head. Then the miners appeared to sit down on a boulder, though I could not see them distinctly enough to be very sure what they did. One said, I heard noise as plain as I ever heard anything. Seen to be about there. A stone whizzed by my head. I flattened myself out in the dust like a postage stamp and thought to myself if he mended his aim ever so little he would probably hear another noise. In my heart now I execrated secret expeditions. I promised myself that this should be my last, though the Sierras were ribbed with cement veins. Then one of the men said, I'll tell you what. Welch knew what he was talking about when he said he saw a white man today. I heard horses. That was the noise. I'm going down to Welch's right away. They left, and I was glad. I did not care with it they went, so they went. I was willing they should visit Welch and the sooner the better. As soon as they closed their cabin door my comrades emerged from the gloom. They had caught the horses and were waiting for a clear coast again. We remounted the cargo on the pack horse and got under way, and as day broke we reached the divide and joined Van Dorn. Then we journeyed down into the valley of the lake and feeling secure we halted to cook breakfast, for we were tired and sleepy and hungry. Three hours later the rest of the population filed over the divide in a long procession and drifted off out of sight around the borders of the lake. Whether or not my accident had produced this result we never knew, but at least one thing was certain. The secret was out and white men would not enter upon a search for the cement mine this time. We were filled with chagrin. We held a council and decided to make the best of our misfortune and enjoy a week's holiday on the borders of the curious lake. Mono it is sometimes called and sometimes the Dead Sea of California. It is one of the strangest freaks of nature to be found in any land, but it is hardly ever mentioned in print and very seldom visited because it lies away off the usual routes of travel and besides is so difficult to get at that only men content to endure the roughest life will consent to take upon themselves the discomforts of such a trip. On the morning of our second day we traveled around to a remote and particularly wild spot on the borders of the lake where a stream of fresh ice cold water entered it from the mountain side and then we went regularly into camp. We hired a large boat and two shotguns from a lonely ranch man who lived some 10 miles further on and made ready for comfort and recreation. We soon got thoroughly acquainted with the lake and all its peculiarities. End of Chapter 37 This is Chapter 38 of Roughing It. This is LibriVox Recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox.org Roughing It by Mark Twain Chapter 38 Mono Lake lies in a lifeless, treeless, hideous desert 8,000 feet above the level of the sea and is guarded by mountains 2,000 feet higher whose summits are always closed in clouds. This solemn, silent, sailless sea, this lonely tenant of the loneliest spot on earth, is little graced with the picturesque. It is an unpretending expanse of grayish water about a hundred miles in circumference with two islands in its center. Mere upheavals of rent and scorched unblistered lava snowed over with gray banks and drifts of pumice stone and ashes, the winding sheet of the dead volcano whose vast crater the lake has seized upon and occupied. The lake is 200 feet deep and its sluggish waters are so strong with alkali that if you only dip the most hopelessly soiled garment into them once or twice and ring it out, it will be found as clean as if it had been through the ablest of washer women's hands. While we camped there, our laundry work was easy. We tied the wheatx washing astern of our boat and sailed a quarter of a mile and the job was complete. All to the ringing out. If we threw the water on our heads and gave them a rubber sew, the white lather would pile up three inches high. This water is not good for bruised places and abrasions of the skin. We had a valuable dog. He had raw places on him. He had more raw places on him than sound ones. He was the rawest dog I almost ever saw. He jumped overboard one day to get away from the flies, but it was bad judgment. In his condition it would have been just as comfortable to jump into the fire. The alkali water nipped him in all the raw places simultaneously and he struck out for the shore with considerable interest. He yelped and barked and howled as he went, and by the time he got to the shore there was no bark to him, for he had barked the bark all out of us inside, and the alkali water had cleaned the bark all off his outside, and he probably wished he had never embarked in any such enterprise. He ran around and around in circles and pawed the earth and clawed the air and threw double somersaults, sometimes backward and sometimes forward, in the most extraordinary manner. He was not a demonstrative dog as a general thing, but rather of a grave and serious turn of mind, and I never saw him take so much interest in anything before. He finally struck out over the mountains at a gate which we estimated at about 250 miles an hour, and he is going yet. This was about nine years ago. We look for what is left of him along here every day. A white man cannot drink the water of Mono Lake, for it is nearly pure lie. It is said that the Indians in the vicinity drink it sometimes, though it is not improbable, for they are among the purest liars I ever saw. There will be no additional charge for this joke, except to parties requiring an explanation of it. This joke has received high commendation from some of the ablest minds of the age. There are no fish in Mono Lake, no frogs, no snakes, no polywogs, nothing in fact that goes to make life desirable. Millions of wild ducks and seagulls swim about the surface, but no living thing exists under the surface, except a white feathery sort of worm, one half an inch long, which looks like a bit of white thread frayed out at the sides. If you dip up a gallon of water, you will get about 15,000 of these. They give to the water a sort of grayish white appearance. Then there is a fly, which looks something like our house fly. These settle on the beach to eat the worms that wash ashore. And any time you can see there, a belt flies an inch deep and six feet wide, and this belt extends clear around the lake, a belt that flies 100 miles long. If you throw a stone among them, they swarm up so thick that they look dense like a cloud. You can hold them under the water as long as you please. They do not mind it. They are only proud of it. When you let them go, they pop up to the surface as dry as a patent office report, and walk off as unconcernedly as if they had been educated especially with a view to affording instructive entertainment to man in that particular way. Providence leaves nothing to go by chance. All things have their uses and their part and proper place in nature's economy. The ducks eat the flies, the flies eat the worms, the Indians eat all three, the wild cats eat the Indians, the white folks eat the wild cats, and thus all things are lovely. Mono Lake is 100 miles in a straight line from the ocean, and between it and the ocean are one or two ranges of mountains. Yet thousands of seagulls go there every season to lay their eggs and rear their young. One would soon expect to find seagulls in Kansas, and in this connection let us observe another instance of nature's wisdom. The islands in the lake being merely huge masses of lava coated over with ashes and pumice stone and utterly innocent of vegetation or anything that would burn, and seagull's eggs being entirely useless to anybody unless they be cooked. Nature has provided an unfailing spring of boiling water on the largest island, and you can put your eggs in there, and in four minutes you can boil them as hard as any statement I have made during the past fifteen years. Within ten feet of the boiling spring is a spring of pure cold water sweet and wholesome. So in that island you get your board and washing free of charge, and if nature had gone further and furnished a nice American hotel clerk who was crusty and disobliging and didn't know anything about the timetables or the railroads or anything and was proud of it, I would not wish for a more desirable boarding house. Half a dozen little mountain brooks flow into Mono Lake, but not a stream of any kind flows out of it. It neither rises nor falls, apparently, and what it does with its surplus water is a dark and bloody mystery. There are only two seasons in the region round about Mono Lake, and these are the breaking up of one winter and the beginning of the next. More than once in Esmeralda I have seen a perfectly blistering morning open up with the thermometer at ninety degrees at eight o'clock and seen the snow fall fourteen inches deep, and that same identical thermometer go down to forty-four degrees under shelter before nine o'clock at night. Under favorable circumstances it snows at least once in every single month in the year in the little town of Mono. So uncertain is the climate in summer that a lady who goes out visiting cannot hope to be prepared for all emergencies unless she takes her fan under one arm and her snowshoes under the other. When they have a fourth of July procession it generally snows on them and they do say that as a general thing when a man calls for a brandy toddy there the barkeeper chops it off with a hatchet and wraps it up in a paper like maple sugar. And it is further reported that the old soakers haven't any teeth. War them out eating gin cocktails and brandy punches. I do not endorse that statement. I simply give it for what it is worth. And it is worth, well, I should say millions to any man who can believe it without straining himself, but I do endorse the snow on the fourth of July because I know that to be true. About seven o'clock one blistering hot morning for it was now dead summertime. Higby and I took the boat and started on a voyage of discovery to the two islands. We had often longed to do this, but had been deterred by the fear of storms, for they were frequent and severe enough to capsize an ordinary rowboat like ours without great difficulty. And once capsized death would ensue in spite of the bravest swimming for that venomous water would eat a man's eyes out like fire and burn him out inside too, if he shipped to sea. It was called twelve miles straight out to the islands, a long pull and a warm one. But the morning was so quiet and sunny and the lake so smooth and glassy and dead that we could not resist the temptation. So we filled two large tin can teems with water, since we were not acquainted with the locality of the spring said to exist on the large island, and started. Higby's brawny muscles gave the boat good speed, but by the time we reached our destination we judged that we had pulled near fifteen miles than twelve. We landed on the big island and went ashore. We tried the water in the canteens now and found that the sun had spoiled it. It was so brackish that we could not drink it. So we poured it out and began a search for the spring, for thirst augments fast as soon as it is apparent that one has no means at hand of quenching it. The island was a long, moderately high hill of ashes, nothing but gray ashes and pumice stone, in which we sunk to our knees at every step. And all around the top was a forbidding wall of scorched and blasted rocks. When we reached the top and got within the wall we found simply a shallow, far-reaching basin carpeted with ashes and here and there a patch of fine sand. In places picturesque jets of steam shot up out of crevices, giving evidence that although this ancient crater had gone out of active business, there was still some fire left in its furnaces. Close to one of these jets of steam stood the only tree on the island, a small pine of most graceful shape and most faultless symmetry. Its color was a brilliant green, for the steam drifted unceasingly through its branches and kept them always moist. It contrasted strangely enough, did this vigorous and beautiful outcast, with its dead and dismal surroundings. It was like a cheerful spirit in a mourning household. We hunted for the spring everywhere, traversing the full length of the island, two or three miles, and crossing it twice, climbing ash hills patiently and then sliding down the other side in a sitting posture, plowing up smothering volumes of gray dust. But we found nothing but solitude, ashes and a heartbreaking silence. Finally we noticed that the wind had risen, and we forgot our thirst in a solitude of greater importance. For the lake being quiet we had not taken pains about securing the boat. We hurried back to a point overlooking our landing-place, and then, but mere words cannot describe our dismay, the boat was gone. The chances were that there was not another boat on the entire lake. The situation was not comfortable. In truth, to speak plainly, it was frightful. We were prisoners on a desolate island, in aggravating proximity to friends who were for the present helpless to aid us, and what was still more uncomfortable was the reflection that we had neither food nor water. But presently we sighted the boat. It was drifting along leisurely, about 50 yards from shore, tossing in a foamy sea. It drifted and continued to drift, but at the same safe distance from land, and we walked along, abreast it, and waited for fortune to favour us. At the end of an hour it approached a jutting cape, and Higbee ran ahead and posted himself on the utmost verge and prepared for the assault. If we failed there, there was no hope for us. It was driving gradually shoreward all the time now, but whether it was driving fast enough to make the connection or not was the momentous question. When it got within 30 steps of Higbee, I was so excited that I fancied I could hear my own heartbeat. When a little later it dragged slowly along and seemed about to go by, only one little yard out of reach, it seemed as if my heart stood still, and when it was exactly abreast of him and began to widen away, and he still standing like a watching statue, I knew my heart did stop. But when he gave a great spring the next instant and lit fairly in the stern, I discharged a war-woop that woke the solitudes. But it dulled my enthusiasm presently when he told me that he had not been caring whether the boat came within jumping distance or not so that it passed within eight or ten yards of him, for he had made up his mind to shut his eyes and mouth and swim that trifling distance. Imbasil that I was, I had not thought of that. It was only a long swim that could be fatal. The sea was running high, and the storm increasing. It was growing late, too, three or four in the afternoon. Whether to venture toward the mainland or not was a question of some moment. But we were so distressed by thirst that we decided to try it, and so Higbee fell to work and I took the steering-or. When we had pulled a mile, laboriously, we were evidently in serious peril, for the storm had greatly augmented. The billows ran very high and were capped with foaming crests. The heavens were hung with black and the wind blew with great fury. We would have gone back now, but we did not dare to turn the boat around because as soon as she got in the trough of the sea she would upset, of course. Our only hope lay in keeping her head on to the seas. It was hard work to do this. She plunged so, and so beat and labored the billows with her rising and falling bows. And now and then one of Higbee's oars would trip on the top of a wave and the other one would snatch the boat half round in spite of my cumbersome steering apparatus. We were drenched by the sprays constantly and the boat occasionally shipped water. By and by, powerful as my comrade was, his great exertions began to tell on him, and he was anxious that I should change places with him till he could rest a little. But I told him this was impossible, for if the steering-or were dropped a moment while we changed, the boat would slew around into the trough of the sea cap size and in less than five minutes we would have a hundred gallons of soap suds in us and be eaten up so quickly that we could not even be present at our own inquest. But things cannot last always. Just as the darkness shut down we came booming into port, head on. Higbee dropped his oars to hurrah. I dropped mine to help. The sea gave the boat a twist and over she went. The agony that alkali water inflicts on bruises, chafes, and blistered hands is unspeakable, and nothing but greasing all over will modify it. But we ate, drank, and slept well that night, notwithstanding. In speaking of the peculiarities of Mono Lake I ought to have mentioned that at intervals all around its shores stand picturesque turret-looking masses and clusters of a whitish coarse-grained rock that resembles inferior mortar dried hard. And if one breaks off fragments of this rock he will find perfectly shaped and thoroughly petrified gulls eggs deeply embedded in the mass. How did they get there? I simply state the fact, for it is a fact, and leave the geological reader to crack the nut at his leisure and solve the problem after his own fashion. At the end of a week we adjourned to the sierras on a fishing excursion, and spent several days in camp under snowy castle peak, and fished successfully for trout in a bright miniature lake whose surface was between ten and eleven thousand feet above the level of the sea, cooling ourselves during the hot August noons by sitting on snow banks ten feet deep under whose sheltering edges, fine grass, and dainty flowers flourished luxuriously, and at night entertaining ourselves by almost freezing to death. Then we returned to Mano Lake, and finding that the cement excitement was over for the present, packed up, and went back to Esmeralda. Mr. Blue reconnoitred a while, and not liking the prospect, set out alone for Humboldt. About this time occurred a little incident which has always had a sort of interest to me, from the fact that it came so near instigating my funeral. At a time when an Indian attack had been expected the citizens hid their gunpowder where it would be safe and yet convenient to hand when wanted. A neighbor of ours hid six cans of riflepowder in the bake oven of an old discarded cooking stove, which stood on the open ground near a frame outhouse or shed, and from and after that day never thought of it again. We hired a half-tamed Indian to do some washing for us, and he took up quarters under the shed with his tub. The ancient stove, reposed within six feet of him and before his face. Finally it occurred to him that hot water would be better than cold, and he went out and fired up under that forgotten powder magazine and set on a kettle of water. Then he returned to his tub. I entered the shed presently and threw down some more clothes, and was about to speak to him when the stove blew up with a prodigious crash and disappeared, leaving not a splinter behind. Fragments of it fell in the streets full two hundred yards away. Nearly a third of the shed roof over our heads was destroyed, and one of the stove lids, after cutting a small stanchion half and two in front of the Indian, whizzed between us and drove partly through the weather boarding beyond. I was as white as a sheet and as weak as a kitten and speechless. But the Indian betrayed no trepidation, no distress, not even discomfort. He simply stopped washing, leaned forward, and surveyed the clean, blank ground a moment, and then remarked, —'Hm! Damn stove! Heep gone!' and resumed his scrubbing as placidly as if it were an entirely customary thing for a stove to do. I will explain that heep is Indian English for very much. The reader will perceive the exhaustive expressiveness of it in the present instance. I now come to a curious episode, the most curious, I think, that had yet accented my slothful, valueless, heedless career. Out of a hillside toward the upper end of the town projected a wall of reddish-looking quartz croppings, the exposed comb of a silver-bearing ledge that extended deep down into the earth, of course. It was owned by a company entitled the Wide West. There was a shaft sixty or seventy feet deep on the underside 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 courts of a particular district looks about like, 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 hornspoon, 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. Higby 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 in to go 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 sum 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 foremen 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 Higbee 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 a 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 sagebrush 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 went almost at the mouth of the shaft. Another of the men rose up from behind the boulder as if to reconnoiter and he dropped on the ground and lay quiet. Presently he crawled on his hands and knees to the mouth of the shaft, gave a quick glance around, then seized the rope and slid down the shaft. He disappeared in the gloom of a side drift just as a head appeared in the mouth of the shaft and somebody shouted, Ho! which he did not answer. He was not disturbed anymore. An hour later he entered the cabin, hot red and ready to burst with smothered excitement and exclaimed in a stage whisper, I knew it, we are rich, it's a blind lead. I thought the very earth reeled under me. Doubt, conviction, doubt again, exaltation, hope, amazement, belief, unbelief. Every emotion imaginable swept in wild procession through my heart and brain and I could not speak a word. After a moment or two of this mental fury I shook myself to rights and said, Say it again. It's blind lead. Cal, let's burn the house or kill somebody. Let's get out of where there's room to hurrah. But what is the use? It is a hundred times too good to be true. It's a blind lead for a million, hanging wall, foot wall, clay, casings, everything complete. He swung his hat and gave three cheers and I cast doubt to the winds and chimed in with a will, for I was worth a million dollars and did not care whether school kept or not. But perhaps I ought to explain. A blind lead is a lead or ledge that does not crop out above the ground. A miner does not know where to look for such leads, but they are often stumbled upon by accident in the course of driving a tunnel or sinking a shaft. Higbee knew the wide west rock perfectly well, and the more he had examined the new developments the more he was satisfied that the ore could not have come from the wide west vein. And so had it occurred to him alone, of all the camp, that there was a blind lead down in the shaft, and that even the wide west people themselves did not suspect it. He was right. When he went down the shaft he found that the blind lead held its independent way through the wide west vein, cutting it diagonally, and that it was enclosed in its own well-defined casing rocks and clay. Hence it was public property. Both leads being perfectly well defined it was easy for any miner to see which one belonged to the wide west and which did not. We thought it well to have a strong friend, and therefore we brought the foreman of the wide west to our cabin that night and revealed the great surprise to him. Higbee said, We are going to take possession of this blind lead, record it, and establish ownership, and then forbid the wide west company to take out any more of the rock. You cannot help your company in this matter. Nobody can help them. I will go into the shaft with you and prove to your entire satisfaction that it is a blind lead. Now we propose to take you in with us, and claim the blind lead in our three names. What do you say? What could a man say who had an opportunity to simply stretch forth his hand and take possession of a fortune without risk of any kind, and without wronging anyone or attaching the least taint of dishonor to his name? He could only say, agreed. The notice was put up that night, and Dooley spread upon the recorder's books before ten o'clock. We claimed two hundred feet each, six hundred feet in all, the smallest and compactest organization in the district, and the easiest to manage. No one can be so thoughtless as to suppose that we slept that night. Higbee and I went to bed at midnight, but it was only to lie broad awake and think, dream, scheme. The flawless, tumble-down cabin was a palace, the ragged gray blankets, silk, the furniture, rosewood, and a mahogany. Each new splendor that burst out of my visions of the future whirled me bodily over in bed, or jerked me to a sitting posture, just as if an electric battery had been applied to me. We shot fragments of conversation back and forth at each other. Once, Higbee said, when are you going home to the States? Tomorrow, with an evolution or two, ending with a sitting position? Well, no, but next month, that furthest. We'll go in the same steamer, agreed. A pause. Steamer of the tenth? Yes. No, the first. All right. Another pause. Where are you going to live? said Higbee. San Francisco. That's me. Pause. Too high. Too much climbing from Higbee. What is? I was thinking of Russian Hill, building a house up there. Too much climbing. Shouldn't you keep a carriage? Of course, I forgot that. Pause. Cal, what kind of a house are you going to build? I was thinking about that. Three-story and an attic. But what kind? Well, I don't hardly know. Brick, I suppose. Brick? Bosch? Why? What is your idea? Brown stone front, French plate glass, billiard room off the dining room, statuary, and paintings, shrubbery and two-acre grass-plat, greenhouse, iron dog on the front stoop, gray horses, landow, and a coachman with a bug on his hat. By George. A long pause. Cal, when are you going to Europe? Well, I hadn't thought of that. When are you? In the spring. Going to be gone all summer? All summer. I shall remain there three years. No. But are you an earnest? Indeed I am. I will go along, too. Why, of course you will. What part of Europe shall you go to? All parts. France, England, Germany, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Syria, Greece, Palestine, Arabia, Persia, Egypt, all over, everywhere. I'm agreed. All right. Won't it be a swell trip? We'll spend forty or fifty thousand dollars trying to make it one, anyway. Another long pause. Higby, we owe the butcher six dollars, and he has been threatening to stop our hang the butcher. Amen. And so it went on. By three o'clock we found it was no use, and so we got up and played cribbage and smoked pipes till sunrise. It was my week to cook. I always hated cooking. Now I abhorred it. The news was all over town. The former excitement was great. This one was greater still. I walked the streets serene and happy. Higby said the foreman had been offered two hundred thousand dollars for his third of the mine. I said I would like to see myself selling for any such price. My ideas were lofty. My figure was a million. Still, I honestly believe that if I had been offered it, it would have had no other effect than to make me hold off for more. I found abundant enjoyment in being rich. A man offered me a three hundred dollar horse and wanted to take my simple, unendorsed note for it. That brought the most realizing sense I had yet had that I was actually rich, beyond shadow of doubt. It was followed by numerous other evidences of a similar nature, among which I may mention the fact of the butcher leaving us a double supply of meat and saying nothing about money. By the laws of the district, the locators or claimants of a ledge were obliged to do a fair and reasonable amount of work on their new property within ten days after the date of the location or the property was forfeited, and anybody could go and seize it the chose. So we determined to go to work the next day. About the middle of the afternoon, as I was coming out of the post office, I met a Mr. Gardner who told me that Captain John Nye was lying dangerously ill at his place, the nine-mile ranch, and that he and his wife were not able to give him nearly as much care and attention as his case demanded. I said, if he would wait for me a moment, I would go down and help in the sick room. I ran to the cabin to tell Higbee he was not there, but I left a note on the table for him, and a few minutes later I left town in Gardner's wagon. Roughing It by Mark Twain Chapter 41 Captain Nye was very ill indeed with spasmodic rheumatism, but the old gentleman was himself, which is to say he was kind-hearted and agreeable and comfortable, but a singularly violent wildcat when things did not go well. He would be smiling along pleasantly enough when a sudden spasm of his disease would take him and he would go out of his smile into a perfect fury. He would groan and wail and howl with the anguish and fill up the odd chinks with the most elaborate profanity that strong convictions and a fine fancy could contrive. With fair opportunity he could swear very well and handle his adjectives with considerable judgment, but when the spasm was on him it was painful to listen to him, he was so awkward. However, I had seen him nurse a sick man himself and put up patiently with the inconveniences of the situation, and consequently I was willing that he should have full license now that his own turn had come. He could not disturb me. With all his raving and ranting, for my mind had work on hand, and it labored on diligently, night and day whether my hands were idle or employed. I was altering and amending the plans for my house and thinking over the propriety of having the billiard room in the attic instead of on the same floor with the dining-room. Also, I was trying to decide between green and blue for the upholstery of the drawing-room for, although my preference was blue, I feared it was a color that would be too easily damaged by dust and sunlight. Likewise, while I was content to put the coachman in a modest livery, I was uncertain about a footman. I needed one, and was even resolved to have one, but wished he could properly appear and perform his functions out of livery, for I somewhat dreaded so much show, and yet, in as much as my late grandfather had had a coachman and such things, but no liveries, I felt rather drawn to beat him, or beat his ghost at any rate. I was also systematizing the European trip, and managed to get it all laid out as to root and length of time to be devoted to it, everything with one exception, namely, whether to cross the desert from Cairo to Jerusalem per camel, or go by sea to Beirut and thence down through the country per caravan. Meantime, I was writing to the friends at home every day, instructing them concerning all my plans and intentions, and directing them to look up a handsome homestead for my mother, and agree upon a price for it against my coming, and also directing them to sell my share of the Tennessee land, and tender the proceeds to the widows and orphans fund of the typographical union of which I had long been a member in good standing. This Tennessee land had been in the possession of the family many years, and promised to confer high fortune upon us some day. It still promises it, but in a less violent way. When I had been nursing the captain nine days, he was somewhat better but very feeble. During the afternoon we lifted him into a chair and gave him an alcoholic vapor bath, and then set about putting him on the bed again. We had to be exceedingly careful, for the least jar produced pain. Gardener had his shoulders and I his legs. In an unfortunate moment I stumbled and the patient fell heavily on the bed in an agony of torture. I never heard a man swear so in my life. He raved like a maniac and tried to snatch a revolver from the table, but I got it. He ordered me out of the house and swore a world of oaths that he would kill me wherever he caught me when he got on his feet again. It was simply a passing fury and meant nothing. I knew he would forget it in an hour and maybe be sorry for it too, but it angered me a little at the moment, so much so indeed that I determined to go back to Esmeralda. I thought he was able to get along alone now since he was on the war-path. I took supper and as soon as the moon rose began my nine-mile journey on foot. Even millionaires needed no horses in those days for a mere nine-mile jaunt without baggage. As I raised the hill over looking the town it lacked fifteen minutes of twelve. I glanced at the hill over beyond the canyon, and in the bright moonlight saw what appeared to be about half the population of the village massed on and around the wide west croppings. My heart gave an exulting bound, and I said to myself, they have made a new strike tonight and struck it richer than ever, no doubt. I started over there but gave it up. I said the strick would keep, and I had climbed hill enough for one night. I went on down through the town, and as I was passing a little German bakery a woman ran out and begged me to come in and help her. She said her husband had a fit. I went in, and judged she was right. He appeared to have a hundred of them, compressed into one. Two Germans were there, trying to hold him, and not making much of a success of it. I ran up the street half a block or so, and routed out a sleeping doctor, brought him down half-dressed, and we four wrestled with a maniac, and doctored, drenched, and bled him for more than an hour, and the poor German woman did the crying. He grew quiet now, and the doctor and I withdrew and left him to his friends. It was a little after one o'clock. As I entered the cabin door, tired but jolly, the dingy light of a tallow candle revealed Higby, sitting by the pine table, gazing stupidly at my note, which he held in his fingers, and looking pale, old, and haggard. I halted and looked at him. He looked at me, stolidly. I said, Higby, what—what is it? We're ruined. We didn't do the work. The blind leads relocated. It was enough. I sat down sick, grieved, broken-hearted indeed. A minute before I was rich and brimful of vanity. I was a pauper now, and very meek. We sat still an hour, busy with thought, busy with vain and useless self-upbratings, busy with, Why didn't I do this? Why didn't I do that? But neither spoke a word. Then we dropped into mutual explanations, and the mystery was cleared away. It came out that Higby had depended on me as I had on him, and as both of us had on the foreman. The folly of it, it was the first time that ever stayed, and steadfast Higby had left an important matter to chance, or failed to be true to his full share of a responsibility. But he had never seen my note till this moment, and this moment was the first time he had been in the cabin since the day he had seen me last. He also had left a note for me, on that same fatal afternoon, had ridden up on horseback and looked through the window, and, being in a hurry and not seeing me, had tossed the note into the cabin through a broken pane. Here it was, on the floor, where it had remained undisturbed for nine days. Don't fail to do the work before the ten days expire. W has passed through, and given me notice. I am to join him at Mono Lake, and we shall go on from there to-night. He says he will find it this time, sure. Cal. W meant Whiteman, of course. That thrice accursed cement. That was the way of it. An old miner like Higby could no more withstand the fascination of a mysterious mining excitement like this cement foolishness than he would refrain from eating when he was famishing. Higby had been dreaming about the marvelous cement for months, and now, against his better judgment, he had gone off and taken the chances on my keeping secure a mine worth a million undiscovered cement veins. They had not been followed this time. His riding out of town in broad daylight was such a commonplace thing to do that it had not attracted any attention. He said they prosecuted their search in the fastnesses of the mountains during nine days without success. They could not find the cement. Then a ghastly fear came over him that something might have happened to prevent the doing of the necessary work to hold the blind deed. Though indeed he thought such a thing hardly possible. And forthwith he started home with all speed. He would have reached Esmeralda in time, but his horse broke down, and he had to walk a great part of the distance. And so it happened that as he came into Esmeralda by one road, I entered it by another. His was the superior energy, however, for he went straight to the wide west instead of turning aside as I had done, and he arrived there about five or ten minutes too late. The notice was already up. The relocation of our mine completed beyond recall, and the crowd rapidly dispersing. He learned some facts before he left the ground. The foreman had not been seen about the streets since the night we had located the mine. A telegram had called him to California on a matter of life and death, it was said. At any rate he had done no work, and the watchful eyes of the community were taking note of the fact. At midnight of this woeful tenth day the ledge would be relocatable, and by eleven o'clock the hill was black with men prepared to do the relocating. That was the crowd I had seen when I fancied a new strike had been made, idiot that I was. We three had the same right to relocate the lead that other people had provided we were quick enough. As midnight was announced, fourteen men duly armed and ready to back their proceedings, put up their notice and proclaimed their ownership of the blind lead under the nude name of Johnson. But A. D. Allen, our partner, the foreman, put in a sudden appearance about that time, with a cocked revolver in his hand and said his name must be added to the list, or he would thin out the Johnson Company sum. He was a manly, splendid, determined fellow, and known to be as good as his word, and therefore a compromise was affected. They put in his name for a hundred feet, reserving to themselves the customary two hundred feet each. Such was the history of the night's events, as Higby gathered from a friend on the way home. Higby and I cleared out on a new mining excitement the next morning, glad to get away from the scene of our sufferings, and after a month or two of hardship and disappointment returned to Esmeralda once more. Then we learned that the Wide West and the Johnson Companies had consolidated, that the stock, thus united, comprised five thousand feet, or shares, that the foreman, apprehending tiresome litigation, and considering such a huge concern unwieldy, had sold his hundred feet for ninety thousand dollars in gold and gone home to the States to enjoy it. If the stock was worth such a gallant figure with five thousand shares in the corporation, it makes me dizzy to think what it would have been worth with only our original six hundred in it. It was the difference between six hundred men owning a house and five thousand owning it. We would have been millionaires if we had only worked with pick and spade one little day on our property, and so secured our ownership. It reads like a wild, fancy sketch, but the evidence of many witnesses, and likewise that of the official records of Esmeralda District, is easily obtainable and proof that it is a true history. I can always have it to say that I was absolutely and unquestionably worth a million dollars once for ten days. A year ago, my esteemed and in every way estimable old millionaire partner Higbee wrote me from an obscure little mining camp in California that after nine or ten years of buffettings and hard striving, he was at last in a position where he could command twenty-five hundred dollars and said he meant to go into the fruit business in a modest way. How such a thought would have insulted him the night we lay in our cabin planning European trips and brownstone houses on Russian Hill.