ght. He was waiting at the breach, impatient of delay,
and crawled, half-naked, through the jagged opening, while the foul
air of the heading was still gushing into the mine."

Meanwhile, over the heads of the workers of the Sutro tunnel, a not
less marvelous change had come over the Comstock Lode. This was the
discovery of the Great Bonanza. After the slump of 1864 and the
terrible handicap of the water, mine-owners on the Comstock fell
deeper and deeper into despair. Gone were the wild days of riot and
extravagance. Only by extreme care, by the use of every modern
appliance, by the lowering of wages--some thirty pitched battles, with
six-shooters, marked this period--were they able to keep going at all.

Then, just as two Irishmen had first found the Comstock, two other
Irishmen forged to the front. These were John W. Mackay, who had begun
work as a day-laborer in the mine, and James G. Fair, a young fellow
who had come to Virginia City with only a few hundred dollars'
capital. They made a daring team. Seizing the opportunities of the
dull times, they bought property after property as it was abandoned by
the owners, who declared that the great lode had "pinched out." With a
third Irishman, Wm. O'Brien, and a 'Frisco miner, James C. Flood, they
bought the entire stretch between the two famous mines--the Ophir and
the Gould & Curry--thus forming what became known to history as the
Virginia Consolidated. The four men paid $50,000 for this huge
property; risking their all on the chance that deeper mining might
reach the supposedly "pinched out" vein.

They sank a shaft, down, down and down,--nothing! They ran a drift to
meet it from one of their purchased mines, and drilled for
weeks--nothing! Then a thin seam of ore appeared, but so small as to
seem insignificant. Fair pursued this vein. A quarter of a million
dollars were eaten up in chasing this elusive line of ore but the vein
would neither disappear nor get wider. Fair's partners tried to insist
on running galleries in various directions to explore--and did so for
one month while he was ill--but Fair returned insistently again to
that thin thread of silver. There was one place where it was only two
inches thick. And then, in October 1873, the miners cut suddenly into
the Big Bonanza.

"No discovery," wrote Lord, "to match this one had ever been made on
this earth from the time when the first miner struck a ledge with his
rude pick. The plain facts are as marvelou