few months' time, dragged, clung, retrograded, or advanced slowly
during a period of eight or nine years. But the strong arms of Biggs and
Thatcher held POSSESSION, and possibly, by the same tactics employed
on the other side, arrested or delayed ejectment, and so made and sold
quicksilver, while their opponents were spending gold, until Biggs,
sorely hit in the interlacings of his armor, fell in the lists, his
cheek growing waxen and his strong arm feeble, and finding himself in
this sore condition, and passing, as it were, made over his share in
trust to his comrade, and died. Whereat, from that time henceforward,
Royal Thatcher reigned in his stead.

And so, having anticipated the legal record, we will go back to the
various human interests that helped to make it up.

To begin with Roscommon: To do justice to his later conduct and
expressions, it must be remembered that when he accepted the claim for
the "Red-Rock Rancho," yet unquestioned, from the hands of Garcia, he
was careless, or at least unsuspicious of fraud. It was not until he had
experienced the intoxication of litigation that he felt, somehow, that
he was a wronged and defrauded man, but with the obstinacy of defrauded
men, preferred to arraign some one fact or individual as the impelling
cause of his wrong, rather than the various circumstances that led to
it. To his simple mind it was made patent that the "Blue Mass Company"
were making money out of a mine which he claimed, and which was not yet
adjudged to them. Every dollar they took out was a fresh count in
this general indictment. Every delay towards this adjustment of
rights--although made by his own lawyer--was a personal wrong. The mere
fact that there never was nor had been any quid pro quo for this immense
property--that it had fallen to him for a mere song--only added zest
to his struggle. The possibility of his losing this mere speculation