Then there was John Smith.  He was a good, honest, kind-hearted soul, born and reared in the lower ranks of life, and miraculously ignorant.  He drove a team, and owned a small ranch—­a ranch that paid him a comfortable living, for although it yielded but little hay, what little it did yield was worth from $250 to $300 in gold per ton in the market.  Presently Smith traded a few acres of the ranch for a small undeveloped silver mine in Gold Hill.  He opened the mine and built a little unpretending ten-stamp mill.  Eighteen months afterward he retired from the hay business, for his mining income had reached a most comfortable figure.  Some people said it was $30,000 a month, and others said it was $60,000.  Smith was very rich at any rate.

And then he went to Europe and traveled.  And when he came back he was never tired of telling about the fine hogs he had seen in England, and the gorgeous sheep he had seen in Spain, and the fine cattle he had noticed in the vicinity of Rome.  He was full of wonders of the old world, and advised everybody to travel.  He said a man never imagined what surprising things there were in the world till he had traveled.

One day, on board ship, the passengers made up a pool of $500, which was to be the property of the man who should come nearest to guessing the run of the vessel for the next twenty-four hours.  Next day, toward noon, the figures were all in the purser’s hands in sealed envelopes.  Smith was serene and happy, for he had been bribing the engineer.  But another party won the prize!  Smith said: 

“Here, that won’t do!  He guessed two miles wider of the mark than I did.”

The purser said, “Mr. Smith, you missed it further than any man on board.  We traveled two hundred and eight miles yesterday.”

“Well, sir,” said Smith, “that’s just where I’ve got you, for I guessed two hundred and nine.  If you’ll look at my figgers again you’ll find a 2 and two 0’s, which stands for 200, don’t it?—­and after ’em you’ll find a 9 (2009), which stands for two hundred and nine.  I reckon I’ll take that money, if you please.”

The Gould & Curry claim comprised twelve hundred feet, and it all belonged originally to the two men whose names it bears.  Mr. Curry owned two thirds of it—­and he said that he sold it out for twenty-five hundred dollars in cash, and an old plug horse that ate up his market value in hay and barley in seventeen days by the watch.  And he said that Gould sold out for a pair of second-hand government blankets and a bottle of whisky that killed nine men in three hours, and that an unoffending stranger that smelt the cork was disabled for life.  Four years afterward the mine thus disposed of was worth in the San Francisco market seven millions six hundred thousand dollars in gold coin.

In the early days a poverty-stricken Mexican who lived in a canyon directly back of Virginia City, had a stream of water as large as a man’s wrist trickling from the hill-side on his premises.  The Ophir Company segregated a hundred feet of their mine and traded it to him for the stream of water.  The hundred feet proved to be the richest part of the entire mine; four years after the swap, its market value (including its mill) was $1,500,000.