nished the most accessible timber to build the town, at
prices which amply remunerated him. The practical schemes of
experienced men, the wildest visions of daring dreams delayed or
abortive for want of capital, eventually fell into his hands. Men
sneered at his methods, but bought his shares. Some who affected to
regard him simply as a man of money were content to get only his name
to any enterprise. Courted by his superiors, quoted by his equals, and
admired by his inferiors, he bore his elevation equally without
ostentation or dignity. Bidden to banquets, and forced by his position
as director or president into the usual gastronomic feats of that
civilization and period, he partook of simple food, and continued his
old habit of taking a cup of coffee with milk and sugar at dinner.
Without professing temperance, he drank sparingly in a community where
alcoholic stimulation was a custom. With neither refinement nor an
extended vocabulary, he was seldom profane, and never indelicate. With
nothing of the Puritan in his manner or conversation, he seemed to be
as strange to the vices of civilization as he was to its virtues. That
such a man should offer little to and receive little from the
companionship of women of any kind was a foregone conclusion. Without
the dignity of solitude, he was pathetically alone.

Meantime, the days passed; the first six months of his opulence were
drawing to a close, and in that interval he had more than doubled the
amount of his discovered fortune. The rainy season set in early.
Although it dissipated the clouds of dust under which Nature and Art
seemed to be slowly disappearing, it brought little beauty to the
landscape at first, and only appeared to lay bare the crudenesses of
civilization. The unpainted wooden buildings of Rough-and-Ready,
soaked and dripping with rain, took upon themselves a sleek and shining
ugliness, as of second-hand garments; the absence of cornices or
projections to break the monotony of the long straight lines of
downpour made the town appear as if it had been recently submerged,
every vestige of ornamentation swept away, and only the bare outlines
left. Mud was everywhere; the outer soil seemed to have risen and
invaded the houses even to their most secret recesses, as if outraged
Nature was trying to revenge herself. Mud was brought into the saloons
and barrooms and express offices, on boots, on clothes, on baggage, and
sometimes appeared mysteriously