Roughing It eBook

The hogs are good pocket hunters.  All the summer they root around the bushes, and turn up a thousand little piles of dirt, and then the miners long for the rains; for the rains beat upon these little piles and wash them down and expose the gold, possibly right over a pocket.  Two pockets were found in this way by the same man in one day.  One had $5,000 in it and the other $8,000.  That man could appreciate it, for he hadn’t had a cent for about a year.

In Tuolumne lived two miners who used to go to the neighboring village in the afternoon and return every night with household supplies.  Part of the distance they traversed a trail, and nearly always sat down to rest on a great boulder that lay beside the path.  In the course of thirteen years they had worn that boulder tolerably smooth, sitting on it.  By and by two vagrant Mexicans came along and occupied the seat.  They began to amuse themselves by chipping off flakes from the boulder with a sledge-hammer.  They examined one of these flakes and found it rich with gold.  That boulder paid them $800 afterward.  But the aggravating circumstance was that these “Greasers” knew that there must be more gold where that boulder came from, and so they went panning up the hill and found what was probably the richest pocket that region has yet produced.  It took three months to exhaust it, and it yielded $120,000.  The two American miners who used to sit on the boulder are poor yet, and they take turn about in getting up early in the morning to curse those Mexicans—­and when it comes down to pure ornamental cursing, the native American is gifted above the sons of men.

I have dwelt at some length upon this matter of pocket mining because it is a subject that is seldom referred to in print, and therefore I judged that it would have for the reader that interest which naturally attaches to novelty.

CHAPTER LXI.

One of my comrades there—­another of those victims of eighteen years of unrequited toil and blighted hopes—­was one of the gentlest spirits that ever bore its patient cross in a weary exile:  grave and simple Dick Baker, pocket-miner of Dead-House Gulch.—­He was forty-six, gray as a rat, earnest, thoughtful, slenderly educated, slouchily dressed and clay-soiled, but his heart was finer metal than any gold his shovel ever brought to light—­than any, indeed, that ever was mined or minted.

Whenever he was out of luck and a little down-hearted, he would fall to mourning over the loss of a wonderful cat he used to own (for where women and children are not, men of kindly impulses take up with pets, for they must love something).  And he always spoke of the strange sagacity of that cat with the air of a man who believed in his secret heart that there was something human about it—­may be even supernatural.

I heard him talking about this animal once.  He said: