Yet ever, the deeper they went, the richer grew the ore. When, at last, Mackay, Fair, O'Brien, and Flood sold their holdings, the Bonanza had yielded more than $150,000,000 worth of silver, one-third of which had passed directly into the pockets of the four men.
But what of the first discoverers, McLaughlin and Riley? They had found the silver, but the Bonanza was not for them. McLaughlin worked for a while as a laborer and then was thrown out of the mine by a foreman who said he was too old. He tried a dozen small ventures and not only lost in everything he touched, but caused his partners to lose, also. Bad fortune dogged him steadily. An old man, worn out and hopelessly dispirited, died in a hospital and was buried in a pauper's grave. Later, it was learned that this was McLaughlin.
O'Riley fared no better. He refused to work for others, believing that luck would turn, and that he, who had once discovered so rich a prize, would, some day or other, discover another. One night, in a dream, he heard what he took to be the voices of the fairies of the mountain bidding him dig at a certain barren spot on the hill-slopes of the Sierras, many miles away from the Comstock Lode.
For days, for weeks, for years, he dug, ever hearing the fancied voices leading him on, deeper and deeper still. Mackay offered him money, but O'Riley refused to accept it, demanding that he be given an equal share in the mine, or nothing. He starved and suffered, sometimes finding pieces of pure silver and pure gold in his tunnel, which he ascribed to his fairies (but which rumor says Mackay had arranged to be placed there) and, in old age, his tunnel fell in and crippled him. From the hospital he was taken to an insane asylum, where he died.
Henry Comstock met the fate he deserved. For years he swaggered about Virginia City claiming to be its founder and the discoverer of the Comstock Lode, living on the charity of luckier men who threw him a bar of silver as one throws a bone to a dog, or else selling wild-cat shares to greenhorns. More than once he was justly accused of being in league with the disorderly elements of the city and having taken part in robberies. But a certain rough sense of pity kept him from being strung up to a tree as he deserved a dozen times over—and he died, at last, a suicide.
CHAPTER IX
WHERE TREASURE HIDES
"You won't be achin', none, to hear all o' my roamin's after I quit the Sutro Tunnel," Jim resumed, a couple of days later, when Owens and Clem came to hear the rest of his story, "so I'll cut 'em short. But you'll be wantin' to hear how it was I got into that queer part o' the country where I made my strike.
"It was Father's doin's more'n it was mine. I reckon I'd ha' stuck around the Comstock Lode an' got into reg'lar silver-quartz minin' if I'd gone my own way. But Father didn't have no use for silver. He was a gold prospector, he was, an' he didn't want to do nothin' else.
"After the Comstock got goin' good, with big stamp-mills poundin' an' roarin' night an' day, an' when Virginia City begun to settle into a sure-enough town, Father begun to itch to be away. Folks worried him. Gold, he used to say, had savvy enough to hide itself when a mob come around, an', accordin' to Father's ideas, a placer wasn't no good, anyhow, after two seasons' pickin's.