Now back to the desert—and the printed Crescent story.
Our contribution here at Crescent, with a minimum of outside help, was a 500-foot tunnel driven into the side of a mountain—the rock shot with high assay in gold and silver and copper. But the cost of this work, though a dead loss and highly disheartening, was as nothing compared to the outlay for the 2197 feet of tunnels and shafts we have driven—also with a minimum of help—through solid rock on our Goodsprings claims, where production, though quite good at times, has never caught up with expenses.
And the end is not yet.
You can take it from me that a man has to be insensible to pain to laugh this off.
On the train away back in the valley on this my first trip to Crescent, the conductor had pointed to a distant cluster of white flecks barely discernible through the shimmering, sun-drenched haze that lies always, like a pall, over the desert, and said to me, “There she is—the biggest thing in all Nevada!”
I had become chummy with the conductor, and that chumminess increased mightily when we learned that we were both on the way to become millionaires—as we visualized it then—through the mining route. He told me that he knew my mining partner, that he had engaged Frank Williams to look after the assessment work on some claims he himself owned over in the Goodsprings district. And when I asked the conductor his name and made a move as if to write it down, he shook his head negatively and threw out his hands in a gesture of utter uselessness, and said, “Oh-hell, man, you couldn’t forget it as long as you are in this country. It’s Dry—just plain William Dry.”
My friend’s parting words to me were a mixture of jocularity and serious hope. “Well, so long, old top,” he said. “See you again when we fetch up at the end of the rainbow.”
And do you know, the next time I saw that conductor, two years later—and I might say before either of us had made any appreciable advances on the rainbow’s elusive end — he recognized me at once, and in offering his hand, said: “It’s Dry.” And I said, “Oh-hell, man, don’t I know it!”
And so it was.
That meeting was in Superintendent J. Ross Clark’s private car, hitched to the flyer. We had exchanged some correspondence before, and Ross wanted to tell me in as hopeful words as possible that the officials of his railroad were still watching the situation closely and would build a branch line into our district—to our claims and to his claims — just as soon as the required tonnage was assured. You see, J. Ross Clark, too, was possessed of the desire to harvest a quick fortune and owned mining claims across the flat from our claims in the Goodsprings district.