Some day the inexhaustible placer would be found; or, on a mountainside
where the porphyry was stained, he would carelessly chip off a fragment
of rock, turn it up to the sun, and behold it rich in ruby silver; or,
some day, the vein instead of pinching out would widen; there would be
pay ore almost from the grass-roots--rich, yellow, free-milling gold,
so that he could put up a little arastra, beat out enough in a week to
buy a small stamp-mill, and then, in six months--ten years more of this
fruitless but nourishing certainty were his,--ten years of the awful
solitudes, shared sometimes by his hardy and equally confident wife,
and, at the last, by his boy, who had become old enough to endure with
his father the snow and ice of the mountain tops and the withering heat
of the alkali wastes.

Footsore, hungry most of the time, alternately burned and frozen, he
lived the life cheerfully and tirelessly, with an enthusiasm that never
faltered.

When his day came it brought no surprise, so freshly certain had he
kept of its coming through the twenty years of search.

At his feet, one July morning in 1870, he noticed a piece of
dark-stained rock in a mass of driftstones. So small was it that to
have gone a few feet to either side would have been to miss it. He
picked it up and examined it leisurely. It was rich in silver.

Somewhere, then, between him and the mountain top was the parent stock
from which this precious fragment had been broken. The sun beat hotly
upon him as it had on other days through all the hard years when
certainty, after all, was nothing more than a temperamental faith. All