I said about four hundred thousand dollars a month,
and board, was about all I could reasonably ask, considering
the hard times.
I was ordered off the premises! And yet, when
I look back to those days and call to mind the exceeding
hardness of the labor I performed in that mill, I
only regret that I did not ask him seven hundred thousand.
Shortly after this I began to grow crazy, along with
the rest of the population, about the mysterious and
wonderful “cement mine,” and to make preparations
to take advantage of any opportunity that might offer
to go and help hunt for it.
It was somewhere in the neighborhood of Mono Lake
that the marvellous Whiteman cement mine was supposed
to lie. Every now and then it would be reported
that Mr. W. had passed stealthily through Esmeralda
at dead of night, in disguise, and then we would have
a wild excitement—because he must be steering
for his secret mine, and now was the time to follow
him. In less than three hours after daylight
all the horses and mules and donkeys in the vicinity
would be bought, hired or stolen, and half the community
would be off for the mountains, following in the wake
of Whiteman. But W. would drift about through
the mountain gorges for days together, in a purposeless
sort of way, until the provisions of the miners ran
out, and they would have to go back home. I have
known it reported at eleven at night, in a large mining
camp, that Whiteman had just passed through, and in
two hours the streets, so quiet before, would be swarming
with men and animals. Every individual would
be trying to be very secret, but yet venturing to
whisper to just one neighbor that W. had passed through.
And long before daylight—this in the dead
of Winter—the stampede would be complete,
the camp deserted, and the whole population gone chasing
after W.
The tradition was that in the early immigration, more
than twenty years ago, three young Germans, brothers,
who had survived an Indian massacre on the Plains,
wandered on foot through the deserts, avoiding all
trails and roads, and simply holding a westerly direction
and hoping to find California before they starved,
or died of fatigue. And in a gorge in the mountains
they sat down to rest one day, when one of them noticed
a curious vein of cement running along the ground,
shot full of lumps of dull yellow metal. They
saw that it was gold, and that here was a fortune
to be acquired in a single day. The vein was
about as wide as a curbstone, and fully two thirds
of it was pure gold. Every pound of the wonderful
cement was worth well-nigh $200.
