"We're ruined--we didn't do the work--THE BLIND LEAD'S RELOCATED!"It was enough.I sat down sick, grieved--broken-hearted, indeed.Aminute 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-upbraidings, busy with "Why didn't I do this, and 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 Higbie 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 staid and steadfast Higbie 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 Higbie, could no more withstand the fascination of a mysterious mining excitement like this "cement" foolishness, than he could refrain from eating when he was famishing.Higbie 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 common-place 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 lead (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 woful 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 Ifancied 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 new name of the "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 some." He was a manly, splendid, determined fellow, and known to be as good as his word, and therefore a compromise was effected.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 Higbie gathered from a friend on the way home.
Higbie 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 in 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, Higbie, wrote me from an obscure little mining camp in California that after nine or ten years of buffetings 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 brown stone houses on Russian Hill!.
