e three months ago, and I came in soon as the news reached
Cheyenne. Must have been several hundred in the race to get here
first--about twenty of us won out. I filed on several claims and tried
to hire men to help me do assessment work; but no one would work for
wages. Everyone is raving crazy, bound to strike it rich, and working
double shift to hold as many claims as possible.

Katy, dear, it's been a month since I started this letter. Things have
settled down here now, and the fly-by-nights have vanished. But
there's a few of us sticking to our holes with the notion if we go deep
enough they'll pan out rich. But there's no way of...

They came for me to help with a poor fellow who got hurt when his
tunnel caved in on him. Guess he'll make a die of it too. Seems
terrible, just when he thought he had struck a bonanza, to be killed
that way. Makes me lonesome to think how things turned out for him.

I've got a secret cache straight west of my cabin, forty-eight steps.
Under a big rock I've hid a buckskin sack with the golddust another
fellow and I panned from a bar in the Colorado river. It's not so very
much; but it'll help out in a pinch.

Kate, this camp's played out. I'm quitting, disgusted. After all the
hard work here there's nothing rich; just low-grade stuff that won't
pay freighting charges. Maybe if we had a mill--but there's no use
talking mill, when every fellow here is in the same fix--on his last
legs. We got to get out or starve; we're all living on deer and wild
sheep, but its getting so we can hardly swallow it much longer. I'll
let you know as soon...

It was unfinished.

The sides of the gulch were "gophered" with prospect holes, most of
them very shallow, with little mounds of dirt beside them, like the
graves of dead hopes. Occasionally a deeper hole had picked samples
from the ore vein it followed piled near its opening. Likewise,
outside, some of the cabin doors were little heaps of choice ore which
hopeful owners had brought in against the time when shipments would be
made, or an ore mill set up near by.

I had chanced upon an abandoned mining town, left forever as casually
as though its residents had gone to call upon a neighbor. There are
many such in the mountains of Colorado. During the early gold rushes,
when strikes were made, mining towns sprang up overnight, and later
when leads played out or failed to pan out profitably, or rumor of a
richer strike rea