That was in forty-nine. Ten years later they were hurrying backward over the mountains to the streams that drain Mount Davidson. Nevada had its wealth too, a hidden, rock-ribbed wealth, jealously buried. They tore it out, built a city of tents and shacks as they delved, and in ten years more were gone again, dispersed over the far West like the embers of a fire which a wind scatters.
Then once again the barren state drew them back. Deep in the roots of Mount Davidson one of the greatest ore-bodies in the world lay buried. This time they gathered in their might. Miner, engineer, assayer, stock-jobber, manipulator, manager and millionaire poured over the mountain wall, bringing in their train the birds of prey that follow in the wake of the mining army. The city of tents and cabins grew into a city of streets and buildings and spread, climbing the mountain side in terraces. A railroad crawled perilously to it, looping over the mountain flanks. In a cleared nook by a river the smoke of its mills blackened the sky.
Isolated from the rest of the world, encircled by desolation, the town seethed and boiled with an abnormal activity, a volcano of life in the midst of a dead land. About it the desert brooded, pressing in upon it, watching and waiting. To it the little city was an outside thing, hostile, alien, unwelcome. It scorned the pigmy passions of its men and women, had no sympathy with the extravagances of their money madness. When they had been brushed away like an ant-hill by a passing foot, it would sweep over their town, obliterate their traces, reclaim its own. And once again the silence of a landscape where there is neither ripple of water nor murmur of leaf would resettle in crystal quietude.
Confined within their own walls, with no outlet for the pressure under which they lived, the inhabitants of Virginia burned with a wild activity and energy. The conditions of life were so unusual, so fiercely stimulating to effort and achievement, that average human beings were lifted from their places and became creatures of dauntless initiative. They conquered the unconquerable, accomplished triumphs of daring and ingenuity where under ordinary circumstances they would have recoiled before insuperable obstacles. They were outside themselves, larger for good or evil than they had ever been before or would be again. Nature had dared them to her vanquishing and they had risen to the challenge.
In the spring of 1874 the ferment incident to the opening of the great ore-body that has gone down in history as the “Big Bonanza,” began to bubble toward boiling point. Month by month stocks had steadily risen, and month by month the huge treasure chamber, filled with silver as a nut is with kernel, developed in ever-increasing richness. The city was packed close as a hive with bees with twenty-five thousand souls all quivering to the increasing momentum of the excitement. The mines were a dynamo whence electric vibrations spread into the world outside. The dwellers in huts among the sage were shaken by them. They thrilled along the Pacific slope. In New York and London men felt them and their pulses quickened. The Bonanza times were nearly at the flood.
The city grew with astonishing rapidity, breathlessly climbed the side of Mount Davidson in ascending tiers of streets. There was no time for grading or paving. Two stories in the front meant four in the back, the kitchens of B Street looked over the shingled roofs of the shops on C Street. It was a gray town, clinging to a desolate mountain side, in a gray country. At its base, appearing to force it up the slope, were the hoisting works of the mines, dotted so close along the lode they nearly touched. Every mine in this line was a mighty name in the world of finance. New York, London and Paris waited each morning to hear news from the town in the wilderness. And as the ant-hill swarmed and trembled with the fury of its concentrated life, the desert looked on, serene, incurious, still.
CHAPTER II
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES
The Allen girls moved to Virginia City in April. Their father had gone there early in the year and taken a house which would be a proper and fitting place from which to marry Rosamund. He had found what he thought suitable in the mansion, as they called it in Virginia, of one Murchison, a mining superintendent, who, in the heyday of sudden riches, had built him a comfortable home and then died.
The Murchison mansion had come on the market just at the right moment, Allen told people. Men wondered where his money came from, as the current talk among his kind was that “the bottom had fallen out of the Barranca, and Allen was bust.” He himself spread the story that successful speculations had once again set him on his feet. That something had done so was proved by his renting of the Murchison mansion, a furnished house in the Virginia City of that period being an expensive luxury.
It stood at the south end of B Street, perched high on the top of two sloping terraces which were bulkheaded by a wooden wall, surmounted by an ornamental balustrade. Small fruit trees and flowering shrubs clothed the terraces in a thin, flickering foliage, just showing its first, faint tips of green when the girls arrived. A long flight of steps ran up to a balcony which rounded out about the front door, and upon which one seemed to be mounted high in the air, looking down over a dropping series of flat and peaked roofs to where the dark red walls and tall chimneys of the hoisting works clustered about the city’s feet. Beyond this unrolled the wild, bare landscape, undulating line of mountain beyond mountain, cut clear as cameos against the blue Nevada sky.