nter.

"I returned to my camp an' examined my baggage; nothin' was missin',
not even the gold which I'd carried--all seemed safe. I sat up an'
watched till daybreak, an', havin' snatched a hasty breakfast,
commenced t' pack my animal. Then it was that I discovered, slipped
beneath a strap o' my saddle, a sheet o' paper. Unfoldin' it, I saw
that it was scrawled over in a rude an' almost unreadable hand. This
was what it said, 'This demand of ours shall remain uncancelled, an'
shall be to you as was the Ark o' God among the Philistines. Unless
you return to your father's house an' to the people o' your father's
faith, you shall be visited by the Lord o' Hosts wi' thunder an' wi'
earthquakes, wi' floods, wi' pestilence, wi' famine, an' wi'
bloodshed, until the day of your death, when your name shall not be
known among men.'

"I was seized with panic, for then I knew that the spies o' Mormon had
traced me. But I wouldn't turn back, for I knew that the treasure for
which I had waited, as Jacob waited for Rachel, lay straight ahead. So
I rode forward, tremblin' as I went, carryin' my gun in my hand. At
the end o' the second day I came t' Johntown, an' found that many
things had changed since I had left. There were a dozen shanties in
the town; these were occupied wi' gamblers, storekeepers, an'
liquor-sellers, includin' two white women an' Sarah Winnemucca, the
Piute princess. But the placer-miners had been at work, an' the
gulches were dotted with the tents an' dugouts o' men who had
discovered my secret for themselves. Thomas Paige Comstock was in the
gang, the man who gave his name to the first great strike. They
called 'im Old Pancake, 'cause he was too busy searchin' for gold to
bake bread. Even at that time, as wi' spoon in hand he stirred the
pancake batter, he kept his eyes on the crest o' some distant peak,
an' was lost in dreams o' avarice.

"I hadn't bin there long before I took up wi' a feller named Peter
O'Riley, an' we became pards. We determined to try our luck in the
Walker River Mountains, where some new placers had bin started; but we
hadn't got the money, so we agreed t' work a claim in Six-Mile Canon
till we'd taken out enough dust t' pay for an outfit. We dug a trench
straight up the hillside, by Old Man Caldwell's Spring, through blue
clay an' a yellowish kind o' gravel. But the spring wasted down the
slope, so we stopped work on the trench an' commenced to sink a pit to
collect the water an' make a