joined a mad stampede to the Frazer River gold-fields in British
Columbia, still wild over its first knowledge of silver sulphurets, he
was drawn back by the wonder-tales of the Comstock lode.

Joining the bedraggled caravan over the Carson trail, he continued his
course of bitter hardship in the Washoe Valley. From a patch of barren
sun-baked rock and earth, three miles long and a third of a mile wide,
high up on the eastern slope of Mount Davidson, he beheld more millions
taken out than the wildest enthusiast had ever before ventured to dream
of. But Peter Bines was a luckless unit of the majority that had
perforce to live on the hope produced by others' findings. The time for
his strike had not come.

For ten years more, half-clad in flannel shirt and overalls, he lived
in flimsy tents, tattered canvas houses, and sometimes holes in the
ground. One abode of luxury, long cherished in memory, was a
ten-by-twelve redwood shanty on Feather River. It not only boasted a
window, but there was a round hole in the "shake" roof, fastidiously
cut to fit a stove-pipe. That he never possessed a stove-pipe had made
this feature of the architecture not less sumptuous and engaging. He
lived chiefly on salt pork and beans, cooked over smoky camp-fires.

Through it all he was the determined, eager, confident prospector,
never for an instant prey to even the suggestion of a doubt that he
would not shortly be rich. Whether he washed the golden specks from the
sand of a sage-brush plain, or sought the mother-ledge of some
wandering golden child, or dug with his pick to follow a promising
surface lead, he knew it to be only the matter of time when his day
should dawn. He was of the make that wears unbending hope as its
birthright.