The Spenders | Page 4

rock and earth, three miles long and a third of a mile wide,
high up on the eastern slope of Mount Davidson, he beheld more
millions taken out than the wildest enthusiast had ever before ventured
to dream of. But Peter Bines was a luckless unit of the majority that
had perforce to live on the hope produced by others' findings. The time
for his strike had not come.
For ten years more, half-clad in flannel shirt and overalls, he lived in
flimsy tents, tattered canvas houses, and sometimes holes in the ground.
One abode of luxury, long cherished in memory, was a ten-by-twelve
redwood shanty on Feather River. It not only boasted a window, but
there was a round hole in the "shake" roof, fastidiously cut to fit a
stove-pipe. That he never possessed a stove-pipe had made this feature
of the architecture not less sumptuous and engaging. He lived chiefly
on salt pork and beans, cooked over smoky camp-fires.

Through it all he was the determined, eager, confident prospector,
never for an instant prey to even the suggestion of a doubt that he
would not shortly be rich. Whether he washed the golden specks from
the sand of a sage-brush plain, or sought the mother-ledge of some
wandering golden child, or dug with his pick to follow a promising
surface lead, he knew it to be only the matter of time when his day
should dawn. He was of the make that wears unbending hope as its
birthright.
Some day the inexhaustible placer would be found; or, on a
mountainside where the porphyry was stained, he would carelessly chip
off a fragment of rock, turn it up to the sun, and behold it rich in ruby
silver; or, some day, the vein instead of pinching out would widen;
there would be pay ore almost from the grass-roots--rich, yellow,
free-milling gold, so that he could put up a little arastra, beat out
enough in a week to buy a small stamp-mill, and then, in six
months--ten years more of this fruitless but nourishing certainty were
his,--ten years of the awful solitudes, shared sometimes by his hardy
and equally confident wife, and, at the last, by his boy, who had
become old enough to endure with his father the snow and ice of the
mountain tops and the withering heat of the alkali wastes.
Footsore, hungry most of the time, alternately burned and frozen, he
lived the life cheerfully and tirelessly, with an enthusiasm that never
faltered.
When his day came it brought no surprise, so freshly certain had he
kept of its coming through the twenty years of search.
At his feet, one July morning in 1870, he noticed a piece of
dark-stained rock in a mass of driftstones. So small was it that to have
gone a few feet to either side would have been to miss it. He picked it
up and examined it leisurely. It was rich in silver.
Somewhere, then, between him and the mountain top was the parent
stock from which this precious fragment had been broken. The sun beat
hotly upon him as it had on other days through all the hard years when
certainty, after all, was nothing more than a temperamental faith. All

day he climbed and searched methodically, stopping at noon to eat with
an appetite unaffected by his prospect.
At sunset he would have stopped for the day, camping on the spot. He
looked above to estimate the ground he could cover on the morrow.
Almost in front of him, a few yards up the mountainside, he looked
squarely at the mother of his float: a huge boulder of projecting silicate.
It was there.
During the following week he ascertained the dimensions of his vein of
silver ore, and located two claims. He named them "The Stars and
Stripes" and "The American Boy," paying thereby what he considered
tributes, equally deserved, to his native land and to his only son, Daniel,
in whom were centred his fondest hopes.
A year of European travel had followed for the family, a year of
spending the new money lavishly for strange, long-dreamed-of
luxuries--a year in which the money was joyously proved to be real.
Then came a year of tentative residence in the East. That year was less
satisfactory. The novelty of being sufficiently fed, clad, and sheltered
was losing its fine edge.
Penniless and constrained to a life of privation, Peter Bines had been
strangely happy. Rich and of consequence in a community where the
ways were all of pleasantness and peace, Peter Bines became restless,
discontented, and, at last, unmistakably miserable.
"It can't be because I'm rich," he argued; "it's a sure thing my money
can't keep me from doin' jest what I want to do."
Then a suspicion pricked him; for