eville,
making lots of money at his business and losing it all in mining
ventures. Only the other day Mack had remarked that if his savings had
been allowed to accumulate in some good bank he would now be worth some
fifty thousand dollars. As it was, he was as poor as his humblest guest.
Even Dr. Mason, canny Scot though he was, could not forget the sight of
ninety thousand dollars' worth of gold bullion he had once seen piled up
at North Bloomfield, and so was persuaded to gamble with his earnings.
He had lost as much as Mack. How rosy is the rainbow, and how evanescent
the pot of gold at the end of it! California had swallowed up more
wealth than its gold could ever repay, as Keeler well knew. It was only
occasionally that some lucky devil, or some prudent, saving man like
Robert Palmer, after thirty years in the gold fields, had anything to
show for it.

So Keeler, pondering the deceitfulness of riches, sadly made his way
back across the mountains. Even then Fate was weaving her web about his
old friend Palmer, who was soon to lie in a pauper's grave. Francis
seized a Golden Opportunity.

Francis had so far prospered that he had moved to San Francisco. In the
city he could watch the stock market, as he told himself privately. To
his friends he announced that failing health demanded the change, albeit
the exhilarating air of the Sierras was far more beneficial than the
dampness of the sea coast. But Francis, inheriting ten thousand dollars
from one of his deceased brothers, had moved to San Francisco, taking
with him sundry hundreds and thousands of dollars, entrusted to him by
his Pennsylvania friends for investment. Everybody had faith in the
integrity of Henry Francis.

The next summer, when the blue-bells were in blossom at Grass Valley, he
passed through that prosperous mining town on the narrow gauge bound for
Nevada City and Moore's Flat. This was the summer of 1881, nearly two
years after the murder of Cummins. A still, small voice accused him of
something akin to highway robbery; and it gave his conscience a twinge
to pass the well-known stump which had concealed the robbers. It was bad
enough that the robbers were still at large, a fact that reflected upon
him. "Bed-bug Brown's" mission had proved a fiasco. But the thing that
really worried Francis was his own mission and not the fruitless one of
Brown's. If his own proved fruitless his conscience might be better
satisfied.

But business is business, an