it is more difficult to work and less
easy of access. The richest gold-field in the world, that of the Rand,
in South Africa, which gives one-third of the total gold output of the
world, is of an ore so poor that a forty-niner would have turned up
his nose at it, and the machinery, even of thirty years ago, could
have done nothing with it. Nearly all the big mines of to-day are
winning wealth out of low-grade ore.

"Some of these days, Clem, I'll explain the geology of gold to you,
and show you how it is that the mines which give the richest specimens
are sometimes the poorest mines to work. But I'm breaking into Jim's
story."

"I was jest a-sayin'," continued Jim, who had listened with impatience
to Owens' explanation, "that them as says there ain't no luck in
minin' ain't never done no minin'. I've been showin' you how some men
got rich in a minute an' hundreds got nothin'.

"But there was some fields that was a frost, right from the start.
They promised big an' give big for the first scratch or two.
Then--nothin'! Kern River was one o' those an' Father got bit.

"My grand-pap, he'd gone back to Utah to take command of a band o'
'Destroyin' Angels', as the Gentiles called the Danites, leavin'
Father to go on pannin' on the Sacramento. The claims was peterin' out
fast, but there was good day's wages to be got, still.

"Then, in 1855, come the news o' the Kern River strike. If folk had
gone crazy in forty-nine, they got crazier still this time. There was
all the fame o' the last strike to lure 'em on. The same ol' story o'
desert trails without water, o' minin' camps that were death-traps,
was repeated, only ten times worse. Twenty thousand started in the
same week. The last few miles was a trail o' blood. Men stabbed their
friends in the back to get to the diggin's first. The stakin' o'
claims was done, six-shooter in hand.

"And, o' the twenty thousand, there wasn't twenty that cleaned up
rich. My father, he wasn't one o' the twenty. He prospected, up an'
down, until he'd spent the last ounce o' gold-dust he'd got from five
years' work, an' all but starved to death on his way across the
desert, headin' for Utah.

"When he got into Nevada, he didn't have a pound o' flour left. He
didn't have nothin' left, nothin' but his pick an' shovel an' pan. All
the rest was gone. He didn't have no trade but prospectin'. Well
enough he knew he'd leave his bones on the trail if he tried to foot
it to Salt Lake City.

"He'