“Poor Johnny!” he muttered. “Poor old Johnny! To feel his pick sink into this, to have it in his hands—and never to really work the greatest mine this country ever saw!”
For here, showing so that a novice must have seen and known and understood the glittering promise of it, was a great vein of gold laid bare against the bottom of the cliff-side, where last year’s snows had set the rocks free above; where the side of the cliff had fallen outward disclosing the thing which the mountains had hidden so well and so long.
It was as rich as any pocket the miner had ever seen—richer. And it was not a pocket at all, but a wide, deep vein which ran back into the mountainside; which would make not one man, but hundreds of men, rich, would give them riotous days and wild nights, would bring to the realization of dreams long dreamed. And Johnny Watson, the man who had found this, who had turned back with but a handful of the precious stuff that he might bring his partner with him, was dead and would never take out a nugget.
“All in the cards, Johnny,” he mused bitterly. “And the cards are running wrong for you and me.”
He sat upon a boulder, his eyes brooding over the yellow promise, his heart heavy with the love for a lost partner and the newer love for a woman who was to be lost as soon as he had found her. The shadows drew back from him, the sun found him out; and still he sat staring at the thing which promised and mocked.
At last, with the short laugh of a tired man, he got to his feet, stood for a little looking at the smooth cuts a pick had made in the rocky bank, and then, with no further spoken word, with no look behind him, moved slowly away and went back along the ridge, down the pine-tree and to the lakeside.
There he sat down upon the big white rock, and with the stub of a lead-pencil wrote a letter upon the bit of oiled paper in which his pipe tobacco was wrapped.
Virginia, dear, if I am never to see you again—and who knows how a day like this is going to end?—this is to say good-by for me. I think that you knew how much I love you before I told you last night. So I do not need to tell you again. I didn’t think that love came this way, so swiftly. I am glad, more glad than you can ever understand, that it has come. You will go back to the world. I want you to be very happy. I am enclosing a little present, a farewell gift. I want it to help make you happy, dear. Good-by.
Dick Farley