after which they would plan tunnels and figure estimates of prospective
wealth. Never mind if the food was poor and scanty, and the chill wind
came in everywhere, and the roof leaked like a filter; they were living
in a land where all the mountains were banked with nuggets, where all
the rivers ran gold. Bob Howland declared later that they used to go out
at night and gather up empty champagne-bottles and fruit-tins and pile
them in the rear of their cabin to convey to others the appearance of
affluence and high living. When they lacked for other employment and
were likely to be discouraged, the ex-pilot would "ride the bunk" and
smoke and, without money and without price, distribute riches more
valuable than any they would ever dig out of those Esmeralda Hills. At
other times he talked little or not at all, but sat in one corner and
wrote, wholly oblivious of his surroundings. They thought he was writing
letters, though letters were not many and only to Orion during this
period. It was the old literary impulse stirring again, the desire to
set things down for their own sake, the natural hunger for print. One
or two of his earlier letters home had found their way into a Keokuk
paper--the 'Gate City'. Copies containing them had gone back to Orion,
who had shown them to a representative of the Territorial Enterprise,
a young man named Barstow, who thought them amusing. The Enterprise
reprinted at least one of these letters, or portions of it, and with
this encouragement the author of it sent an occasional contribution
direct to that paper over the pen-name "Josh." He did not care to sign
his own name. He was a miner who was soon to be a magnate; he had no
desire to be known as a camp scribbler.

He received no pay for these offerings, and expected none. They were
sketches of a broadly burlesque sort, the robust horse-play kind of
humor that belongs to the frontier. They were not especially promising
efforts. One of them was about an old rackabones of a horse, a sort of
preliminary study for "Oahu," of the Sandwich Islands, or "Baalbec" and
"Jericho," of Syria. If any one had told him, or had told any reader of
this sketch, that the author of it was knocking at the door of the house
of fame such a person's judgment or sincerity would have been open to
doubt. Nevertheless, it was true, though the knock was timid and halting
and the summons to cross the threshold long delayed.

A winter mining-camp is the most bleak and co