What mattered that his single arm could not lift the treasure he had found!  What mattered that to unfix those glittering stars would still tax both skill and patience!  The work was done, the goal was reached! even his boyish impatience was content with that.  He rose slowly to his feet, unstrapped his long-handled shovel from his back, secured it in the crevice, and quietly regained the summit.

It was all his own!  His own by right of discovery under the law of the land, and without accepting a favor from them.  He recalled even the fact that it was his prospecting on the mountain that first suggested the existence of gold in the outcrop and the use of the hydraulic.  He had never abandoned that belief, whatever the others had done.  He dwelt somewhat indignantly to himself on this circumstance, and half unconsciously faced defiantly towards the plain below.  But it was sleeping peacefully in the full sight of the moon, without life or motion.  He looked at the stars; it was still far from midnight.  His companions had no doubt long since returned to the cabin to prepare for their midnight journey.  They were discussing him, perhaps laughing at him, or worse, pitying him and his bargain.  Yet here was his bargain!  A slight laugh he gave vent to here startled him a little, it sounded so hard and so unmirthful, and so unlike, as he oddly fancied, what he really thought.  But what did he think?

Nothing mean or revengeful; no, they never would say that.  When he had taken out all the surface gold and put the mine in working order, he would send them each a draft for a thousand dollars.  Of course, if they were ever ill or poor he would do more.  One of the first, the very first things he should do would be to send them each a handsome gun and tell them that he only asked in return the old-fashioned rifle that once was his.  Looking back at the moment in after years, he wondered that, with this exception, he made no plans for his own future, or the way he should dispose of his newly acquired wealth.  This was the more singular as it had been the custom of the five partners to lie awake at night, audibly comparing with each other what they would do in case they made a strike.  He remembered how, Alnaschar-like, they nearly separated once over a difference in the disposal of a hundred thousand dollars that they never had, nor expected to have.  He remembered how Union Mills always began his career as a millionnaire by a “square meal” at Delmonico’s; how the Right Bower’s initial step was always a trip home “to see his mother”; how the Left Bower would immediately placate the parents of his beloved with priceless gifts (it may be parenthetically remarked that the parents and the beloved one were as hypothetical as the fortune); and how the Judge would make his first start as a capitalist by breaking a certain faro bank in Sacramento.  He himself had been equally eloquent in extravagant fancy in those penniless days, he who now was quite cold and impassive beside the more extravagant reality.