To use a French expression, I have “got my d—-d satisfy” at last.
Two years' time will make us capitalists, in spite of anything.
Therefore we need fret and fume and worry and doubt no more, but
just lie still and put up with privation for six months. Perhaps 3
months will “let us out.” Then, if government refuses to pay the
rent on your new office we can do it ourselves. We have got to wait
six weeks, anyhow, for a dividend—maybe longer—but that it will
come there is no shadow of a doubt. I have got the thing sifted
down to a dead moral certainty. I own one-eighth of the new
“Monitor Ledge, Clemens Company,” and money can't buy a foot of it;
because I know it to contain our fortune. The ledge is six feet
wide, and one needs no glass to see gold and silver in it....
When you and I came out here we did not expect '63 or '64 to find us
rich men—and if that proposition had been made we would have
accepted it gladly. Now, it is made. I am willing, now, that
“Neary's tunnel” or anybody else's tunnel shall succeed. Some of
them may beat us a few months, but we shall be on hand in the
fullness of time, as sure as fate. I would hate to swap chances
with any member of the tribe....
It is the same man who twenty-five years later would fasten his faith and capital to a type-setting machine and refuse to exchange stock in it, share for share, with the Mergenthaler linotype. He adds:
But I have struck my tent in Esmeralda, and I care for no mines but
those which I can superintend myself. I am a citizen here now, and
I am satisfied, although Ratio and I are “strapped” and we haven't
three days' rations in the house.... I shall work the “Monitor” and
the other claims with my own hands. I prospected 3/4 of a pound of
“Monitor” yesterday, and Raish reduced it with the blow-pipe, and
got about 10 or 12 cents in gold and silver, besides the other half
of it which we spilt on the floor and didn't get....
I tried to break a handsome chunk from a huge piece of my darling
“Monitor” which we brought from the croppings yesterday, but it all
splintered up, and I send you the scraps. I call that “choice”—any
d—-d fool would.
Don't ask if it has been assayed, for it hasn't. It don't need it.
It is simply able to speak for itself. It is six feet wide on top,
and traversed through with veins whose color proclaims their worth.
What the devil does a man want with any more feet when he owns in
the invincible bomb-proof “Monitor”?
There is much more of this, and other such letters, most of them ending with demands for money. The living, the tools, the blasting-powder, and the help eat it up faster than Orion's salary can grow.
“Send me $50 or $100, all you can spare; put away $150 subject to my call—we shall need it soon for the tunnel.” The letters are full of such admonition, and Orion, more insane, if anything, than his brother, is scraping his dollars and pennies together to keep the mines going. He is constantly warned to buy no claims on his own account and promises faithfully, but cannot resist now and then when luring baits are laid before him, though such ventures invariably result in violent and profane protests from Aurora.
“The pick and shovel are the only claims I have any confidence in now,” the miner concludes, after one fierce outburst. “My back is sore, and my hands are blistered with handling them to-day.”
But even the pick and shovel did not inspire confidence a little later. He writes that the work goes slowly, very slowly, but that they still hope to strike it some day. “But—if we strike it rich—I've lost my guess, that's all.” Then he adds: “Couldn't go on the hill to-day. It snowed. It always snows here, I expect”; and the final heart-sick line, “Don't you suppose they have pretty much quit writing at home?”
This is midsummer, and snow still interferes with the work. One feels the dreary uselessness of the quest.
Yet resolution did not wholly die, or even enthusiasm. These things were as recurrent as new prospects, which were plentiful enough. In a still subsequent letter he declares that he will never look upon his mother's face again, or his sister's, or get married, or revisit the “Banner State,” until he is a rich man, though there is less assurance than desperation in the words.
In 'Roughing It' the author tells us that, when flour had reached one dollar a pound and he could no longer get the dollar, he abandoned mining and went to milling “as a common laborer in a quartz-mill at ten dollars a week.” This statement requires modification. It was not entirely for the money that he undertook the laborious task of washing “riffles” and “screening tailings.” The money was welcome enough, no doubt, but the greater purpose was to learn refining, so that when his mines developed he could establish his own mill and personally superintend the work. It is like him to wish us to believe that he was obliged to give up being a mining magnate to become a laborer in a quartz-mill, for there is a grim humor in the confession. That he abandoned the milling experiment at the end of a week is a true statement. He got a violent cold in the damp place, and came near getting salivated, he says in a letter, “working in the quicksilver and chemicals. I hardly think I shall try the experiment again. It is a confining business, and I will not be confined for love or money.”