All at once the town was thrown into a state of extraordinary excitement.  In mining parlance the Wide West had “struck it rich!” Everybody went to see the new developments, and for some days there was such a crowd of people about the Wide West shaft that a stranger would have supposed there was a mass meeting in session there.  No other topic was discussed but the rich strike, and nobody thought or dreamed about anything else.  Every man brought away a specimen, ground it up in a hand mortar, washed it out in his horn spoon, and glared speechless upon the marvelous result.  It was not hard rock, but black, decomposed stuff which could be crumbled in the hand like a baked potato, and when spread out on a paper exhibited a thick sprinkling of gold and particles of “native” silver.  Higbie brought a handful to the cabin, and when he had washed it out his amazement was beyond description.  Wide West stock soared skywards.  It was said that repeated offers had been made for it at a thousand dollars a foot, and promptly refused.  We have all had the “blues”—­the mere sky-blues—­but mine were indigo, now—­because I did not own in the Wide West.  The world seemed hollow to me, and existence a grief.  I lost my appetite, and ceased to take an interest in anything.  Still I had to stay, and listen to other people’s rejoicings, because I had no money to get out of the camp with.

The Wide West company put a stop to the carrying away of “specimens,” and well they might, for every handful of the ore was worth a sun of some consequence.  To show the exceeding value of the ore, I will remark that a sixteen-hundred-pounds parcel of it was sold, just as it lay, at the mouth of the shaft, at one dollar a pound; and the man who bought it “packed” it on mules a hundred and fifty or two hundred miles, over the mountains, to San Francisco, satisfied that it would yield at a rate that would richly compensate him for his trouble.  The Wide West people also commanded their foreman to refuse any but their own operatives permission to enter the mine at any time or for any purpose.  I kept up my “blue” meditations and Higbie kept up a deal of thinking, too, but of a different sort.  He puzzled over the “rock,” examined it with a glass, inspected it in different lights and from different points of view, and after each experiment delivered himself, in soliloquy, of one and the same unvarying opinion in the same unvarying formula: 

“It is not Wide West rock!”

He said once or twice that he meant to have a look into the Wide West shaft if he got shot for it.  I was wretched, and did not care whether he got a look into it or not.  He failed that day, and tried again at night; failed again; got up at dawn and tried, and failed again.  Then he lay in ambush in the sage brush hour after hour, waiting for the two or three hands to adjourn to the shade of a boulder for dinner; made a start once, but was premature—­one of the men came back for something; tried it again, but when almost at the mouth of the shaft, another of the men rose up from behind the boulder as if to reconnoitre, and he dropped on the ground and lay quiet; presently he crawled on his hands and knees to the mouth of the shaft, gave a quick glance around, then seized the rope and slid down the shaft.