discoverer of gold, who had given his name to
the Flat, had found a "pocket," which had made him a rich man; but his
luck remained unique, and as Big Simpson sarcastically remarked, "A man
might as well try to find a pocket in a woman's dress as to search for a
second pocket in Thompson's Flat." For eight months of the year the
ground was frozen deep and hard, and during the brief summer the heat
was intense. There were hostile Indians in the vicinity of the camp, and
although little danger was to be apprehended from them while the camp
swarmed with armed miners, there was every probability that they would
sooner or later attack the handful of men who had remained, after the
great majority of the miners had abandoned their claims and gone in
search of more promising fields.

In the early part of the summer following Thompson's discovery of gold
there were but thirty men left in the camp, with only a single combined
grocery and saloon to minister to their wants. Partly because of
obstinacy, and partly because of a want of energy to repeat the
experiment of searching for gold in some other unprofitable place, these
thirty men remained, and daily prosecuted their nearly hopeless search
for fortune. Their evenings were spent in the saloon, but there was a
conspicuous absence of anything like jollity. The men were too poor to
gamble with any zest, and the whiskey of the saloon keeper was bad and
dear.

The one gleam of good fortune which had come to the camp was the fact
that the Indians had disappeared, having, as it was believed, gone
hundreds of miles south to attack another tribe. Gradually the miners
relaxed the precautions which had at first been maintained against an
attack, and although every man went armed to his work, sentinels were no
longer posted either by day or night, and the Gatling gun that had been
bought by public subscription in the prosperous days of the camp
remained in the storeroom of the saloon without ammunition, and with its
mechanism rusty and immovable.

Only one miner had arrived at Thompson's Flat that summer. He was a
middle-aged man who said that his name was Montgomery Carleton--a name
which instantly awoke the resentment of the camp, and was speedily
converted into "Monte Carlo" by the resentful miners, who intimated very
plainly that no man could carry a fifteen-inch name in that camp and
live. Monte Carlo, or Monty, as he was usually called, had the further
distinction of being the ug