a lost claim where, in a
deposit of cement rock, gold nuggets were said to be as thick as raisins
in a fruitcake. They did not find the mine, but they visited Mono
Lake--that ghastly, lifeless alkali sea among the hills, which in
'Roughing It' he has so vividly pictured. It was good to get away from
the stress of things; and they repeated the experiment. They made a
walking trip to Yosemite, carrying their packs, camping and fishing in
that far, tremendous isolation, which in those days few human beings had
ever visited at all. Such trips furnished a delicious respite from the
fevered struggle around tunnel and shaft. Amid mountain-peaks and giant
forests and by tumbling falls the quest for gold hardly seemed worth
while. More than once that summer he went alone into the wilderness to
find his balance and to get away entirely from humankind.

XXXVI. LAST MINING DAYS

It was late in July when he wrote:

If I do not forget it, I will send you, per next mail, a pinch of
decom. (decomposed rock) which I pinched with thumb and finger from
Wide West ledge a while ago. Raish and I have secured 200 out of a
company with 400 ft. in it, which perhaps (the ledge, I mean) is a
spur from the W. W.--our shaft is about 100 ft. from the W. W.
shaft. In order to get in, we agreed to sink 30 ft. We have sublet
to another man for 50 ft., and we pay for powder and sharpening
tools.

This was the "Blind Lead" claim of Roughing It, but the episode as
set down in that book is somewhat dramatized. It is quite true that
he visited and nursed Captain Nye while Higbie was off following the
"Cement" 'ignus fatuus' and that the "Wide West" holdings were forfeited
through neglect. But if the loss was regarded as a heavy one, the
letters fail to show it. It is a matter of dispute to-day whether or not
the claim was ever of any value. A well-known California author--[Ella
Sterling Cummins, author of The Story of the Files, etc]--declares:

No one need to fear that he ran any chance of being a millionaire
through the "Wide West" mine, for the writer, as a child, played
over that historic spot and saw only a shut-down mill and desolate
hole in the ground to mark the spot where over-hopeful men had sunk
thousands and thousands, that they never recovered.

The "Blind Lead" episode, as related, is presumably a tale of what might
have happened--a possibility rather than an actuality. It is viv