He then tried to make the man who came up the shaft with him accept a five-dollar gold piece. Not succeeding in this he made him go with him to the nearest saloon and get a glass of beer. Not satisfied with this, and the men below again coming into his mind, he paid the barkeeper for two buckets of beer, telling the miner with him that he wished it given to the men who went to light the candle.
“I have,” said he, “been ver impolite to come away before zee return of zee gentlemen who have gone to re-enlight zee candaile. Veil, zat was one ver curious accident and bring to me one ver terrible experience of zee discomfort of zee heat at zat place of remarkable interest.”
Although the French count doubtless suffered terribly while shut up in the drift, with boiling water and heated rock all about him, his “discomfort,” after all, was not much greater than was that of the miners who played him the trick while drinking the beer he sent them—though their torture was of a different kind. Most amply, yet most innocently, had the Frenchman avenged himself.
CHAPTER LXI.
UNDERGROUND BATTLES
In the early days of Washoe, fights between rival claimants of mining ground were frequent, and often stubbornly contested and bloody. These fights sometimes occurred upon the surface, sometimes far down in the bowels of the earth—one company having broken into ground claimed by another with a drift or a tunnel. On such occasions the rival companies armed and fortified underground as well as upon the surface.
Sometimes a company tried to smoke their rivals out, and in this they generally succeeded, but were, in most instances, themselves smoked out as well, by their own bonfires and stink-pots. Of late years, however, most difficulties in regard to the ownership of mining property have been settled in the courts. Men at last began to realize that battles with guns, pistols, and knives settled nothing; no matter how many lives were sacrificed, matters had to be brought before the proper tribunal at last. Yet a little of the old warlike spirit is occasionally manifested even at the present day.
The last mining fight, of any importance, on the Comstock lode, occurred at the Justice mine on the evening of Saturday, October 3, 1874, which resulted in the death of five men in about as many minutes.
MINERS’ BATTLES.