dedication of that book. Around the cabin stove they would gather, and
paw over their specimens, or test them with blow-pipe and "horn" spoon,
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 t