These various processes of law and equity, which, when exercised practically in the affairs of ordinary business, might have occupied a 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 affected him more strongly than if he had already paid down the million he expected to get from the mine.  I don’t know that I have indicated as plainly as I might that universal preference on the part of mankind to get something from nothing, and to acquire the largest return for the least possible expenditure, but I question my right to say that Roscommon was much more reprehensible than his fellows.

But it told upon him as it did upon all over whom the spirit of the murdered Concho brooded,—­upon all whom avarice alternately flattered and tortured.  From his quiet gains in his legitimate business, from the little capital accumulated through industry and economy, he lavished thousands on this chimera of his fancy.  He grew grizzled and worn over his self-imposed delusion; he no longer jested with his customers, regardless of quality or station or importance; he had cliques to mollify, enemies to placate, friends