week the price went up to seventy dollars and afterward to a hundred and fifty, but nothing could make that man yield.  I suppose he sold that stock of mine and placed the guilty proceeds in his own pocket. [My revenge will be found in the accompanying portrait.] I met three friends one afternoon, who said they had been buying “Overman” stock at auction at eight dollars a foot.  One said if I would come up to his office he would give me fifteen feet; another said he would add fifteen; the third said he would do the same.  But I was going after an inquest and could not stop.  A few weeks afterward they sold all their “Overman” at six hundred dollars a foot and generously came around to tell me about it—­and also to urge me to accept of the next forty-five feet of it that people tried to force on me.

These are actual facts, and I could make the list a long one and still confine myself strictly to the truth.  Many a time friends gave us as much as twenty-five feet of stock that was selling at twenty-five dollars a foot, and they thought no more of it than they would of offering a guest a cigar.  These were “flush times” indeed!  I thought they were going to last always, but somehow I never was much of a prophet.

To show what a wild spirit possessed the mining brain of the community, I will remark that “claims” were actually “located” in excavations for cellars, where the pick had exposed what seemed to be quartz veins—­and not cellars in the suburbs, either, but in the very heart of the city; and forthwith stock would be issued and thrown on the market.  It was small matter who the cellar belonged to—­the “ledge” belonged to the finder, and unless the United States government interfered (inasmuch as the government holds the primary right to mines of the noble metals in Nevada—­or at least did then), it was considered to be his privilege to work it.  Imagine a stranger staking out a mining claim among the costly shrubbery in your front yard and calmly proceeding to lay waste the ground with pick and shovel and blasting powder!  It has been often done in California.  In the middle of one of the principal business streets of Virginia, a man “located” a mining claim and began a shaft on it.  He gave me a hundred feet of the stock and I sold it for a fine suit of clothes because I was afraid somebody would fall down the shaft and sue for damages.  I owned in another claim that was located in the middle of another street; and to show how absurd people can be, that “East India” stock (as it was called) sold briskly although there was an ancient tunnel running directly under the claim and any man could go into it and see that it did not cut a quartz ledge or anything that remotely resembled one.

One plan of acquiring sudden wealth was to “salt” a wild cat claim and sell out while the excitement was up.  The process was simple.