The schemer located a worthless ledge, sunk a shaft on it, bought a wagon load of rich “Comstock” ore, dumped a portion of it into the shaft and piled the rest by its side, above ground.  Then he showed the property to a simpleton and sold it to him at a high figure.  Of course the wagon load of rich ore was all that the victim ever got out of his purchase.  A most remarkable case of “salting” was that of the “North Ophir.”  It was claimed that this vein was a “remote extension” of the original “Ophir,” a valuable mine on the “Comstock.”  For a few days everybody was talking about the rich developments in the North Ophir.  It was said that it yielded perfectly pure silver in small, solid lumps.  I went to the place with the owners, and found a shaft six or eight feet deep, in the bottom of which was a badly shattered vein of dull, yellowish, unpromising rock.  One would as soon expect to find silver in a grindstone.  We got out a pan of the rubbish and washed it in a puddle, and sure enough, among the sediment we found half a dozen black, bullet-looking pellets of unimpeachable “native” silver.  Nobody had ever heard of such a thing before; science could not account for such a queer novelty.  The stock rose to sixty-five dollars a foot, and at this figure the world-renowned tragedian, McKean Buchanan, bought a commanding interest and prepared to quit the stage once more—­he was always doing that.  And then it transpired that the mine had been “salted”—­and not in any hackneyed way, either, but in a singularly bold, barefaced and peculiarly original and outrageous fashion.  On one of the lumps of “native” silver was discovered the minted legend, “Ted states of,” and then it was plainly apparent that the mine had been “salted” with melted half-dollars!  The lumps thus obtained had been blackened till they resembled native silver, and were then mixed with the shattered rock in the bottom of the shaft.  It is literally true.  Of course the price of the stock at once fell to nothing, and the tragedian was ruined.  But for this calamity we might have lost McKean Buchanan from the stage.

CHAPTER XLV.

The “flush times” held bravely on.  Something over two years before, Mr. Goodman and another journeyman printer, had borrowed forty dollars and set out from San Francisco to try their fortunes in the new city of Virginia.  They found the Territorial Enterprise, a poverty-stricken weekly journal, gasping for breath and likely to die.  They bought it, type, fixtures, good-will and all, for a thousand dollars, on long time.  The editorial sanctum, news-room, press-room, publication office, bed-chamber, parlor, and kitchen were all compressed into one apartment and it was a small one, too.  The editors and printers slept on the floor, a Chinaman did their cooking, and the “imposing-stone” was the general dinner table.  But now things were changed.  The paper was a great daily, printed