water, Clemens, as he watched Jim
Gillis or Dick Stoker "washing," would be apt to say, "I don't see no
p'ints about that pan o' dirt that's any better'n any other pan o' dirt,"
and so they kept it up.

Then the rain would come again and interfere with their work. One
afternoon, when Clemens and Gillis were following certain tiny-sprayed
specks of gold that were leading them to pocket--somewhere up the long
slope, the chill downpour set in. Gillis, as usual, was washing, and
Clemens carrying water. The "color" was getting better with every pan,
and Jim Gillis believed that now, after their long waiting, they were to
be rewarded. Possessed with the miner's passion, he would have gone on
washing and climbing toward the precious pocket, regardless of
everything. Clemens, however, shivering and disgusted, swore that each
pail of water was his last. His teeth were chattering and he was wet
through. Finally he said, in his deliberate way:

"Jim, I won't carry any more water. This work is too disagreeable."

Gillis had just taken out a panful of dirt.

"Bring one more pail, Sam," he pleaded.

"Oh, hell, Jim, I won't do it; I'm freezing!"

"Just one more pail, Sam," he pleaded.

"No, sir, not a drop, not if I knew there were a million dollars in that
pan."

Gillis tore a page out of his note-book, and hastily posted a thirty-day
claim notice by the pan of dirt, and they set out for Angel's Camp. It
kept on raining and storming, and they did not go back. A few days later
a letter from Steve Gillis made Clemens decide to return to San
Francisco. With Jim Gillis and Dick Stoker he left Angel's and walked
across the mountains to Jackass Hill in the snow-storm--"the first I ever
saw in California," he says in his notes.

In the mean time the rain had washed away the top of the pan of earth
they had left standing on the hillside, and exposed a handful of
nuggets-pure gold. Two strangers, Austrians, had come along and,
observing it, had sat down to wait until the thirty-day claim notice
posted by Jim Gillis should expire. They did not mind the rain--not with
all that gold in sight--and the minute the thirty days were up they
followed the lead a few pans farther and took out--some say ten, some say
twenty, thousand dollars. In either case it was a good pocket. Mark
Twain missed it by one pail of water. Still, it is just as well,
perhaps, when one remembers that vaster nugget of Angel's Camp--the
Jumping Frog. Jim Gillis alwa