any project meant ruin to it, the single-handed, impoverished possessor of the mine, whose title was contested, and whose reputation was yet to be made,—­poor Biggs, first secretary and only remaining officer of the “Blue Mass Company,” looked ruefully over his books and his last transfer, and sighed.  But I have before intimated that he was built of good stuff, and that he believed in his work,—­which was well,—­and in himself, which was better; and so, having faith even as a grain of mustard seed, I doubt not he would have been able to remove that mountain of quicksilver beyond the overlapping of fraudulent grants.  And, again, Providence—­having disposed of these several scamps—­raised up to him a friend.  But that friend is of sufficient importance to this veracious history to deserve a paragraph to himself.

The Pylades of this Orestes was known of ordinary mortals as Royal Thatcher.  His genealogy, birth, and education are, I take it, of little account to this chronicle, which is only concerned with his friendship for Biggs and the result thereof.  He had known Biggs a year or two previously; they had shared each other’s purses, bunks, cabins, provisions, and often friends, with that perfect freedom from obligation which belonged to the pioneer life.  The varying tide of fortune had just then stranded Thatcher on a desert sand hill in San Francisco, with an uninsured cargo of Expectations, while to Thatcher’s active but not curious fancy it had apparently lifted his friend’s bark over the bar in the Monterey mountains into an open quicksilver sea.  So that he was considerably surprised on receiving a note from Biggs to this purport: 

“Dear Roy—­Run down here and help a fellow.  I’ve too much of a load for one.  Maybe we can make a team and pull ‘Blue Mass’ out yet.  BIGGSEY.”

Thatcher, sitting in his scantily furnished lodgings, doubtful of his next meal and in arrears for rent, heard this Macedonian cry as St. Paul did.  He wrote a promissory and soothing note to his landlady, but fearing the “sweet sorrow” of personal parting, let his collapsed valise down from his window by a cord, and, by means of an economical combination of stage riding and pedestrianism, he presented himself, at the close of the third day, at Biggs’s door.  In a few moments he was in possession of the story; half an hour later in possession of half the mine, its infelix past and its doubtful future, equally with his friend.

Business over, Biggs turned to look at his partner.  “You’ve aged some since I saw you last,” he said.  “Starvation luck, I s’pose.  I’d know your eyes, old fellow, if I saw them among ten thousand; but your lips are parched, and your mouth’s grimmer than it used to be.”  Thatcher smiled to show that he could still do so, but did not say, as he might have said, that self-control, suppressed resentment, disappointment, and occasional hunger had done something in the way of correcting Nature’s obvious mistakes, and shutting up a kindly mouth.  He only took off his threadbare coat, rolled up his sleeves, and saying, “We’ve got lots of work and some fighting before us,” pitched into the “affairs” of the “Blue Mass Company” on the instant.