The author could not gather fortune in a basket, as he had dreamed.  Masses of gold and silver were not lying about.  He gathered a back-load of yellow, glittering specimens, but they proved worthless.  Gold in the rough did not glitter, and was not yellow.  Tillou instructed the others in prospecting, and they went to work with pick and shovel—­then with drill and blasting-powder.  The prospect of immediately becoming millionaires vanished.

“One week of this satisfied me.  I resigned,” is Mark Twain’s brief comment.

The Humboldt reports had been exaggerated.  The Clemens-Clagget-Oliver-Tillou millionaire combination soon surrendered its claims.  Clemens and Tillou set out for Carson City with a Prussian named Pfersdorff, who nearly got them drowned and got them completely lost in the snow before they arrived there.  Oliver and Clagget remained in Unionville, began law practice, and were elected to office.  It is not known what became of the wagon and horses and the two dogs.

It was the end of January when our miner returned to Carson.  He was not discouraged—­far from it.  He believed he had learned something that would be useful to him in a camp where mines were a reality.  Within a few weeks from his return we find him at Aurora, in the Esmeralda region, on the edge of California.  It was here that the Clemens brothers owned the 1,650 feet formerly mentioned.  He had came down to work it.

It was the dead of winter, but he was full of enthusiasm, confident of a fortune by early summer.  To Pamela he wrote: 

“I expect to return to St. Louis in July—­per steamer.  I don’t say that I will return then, or that I shall be able to do it—­but I expect to—­you bet . . . .  If nothing goes wrong, we’ll strike the ledge in June.”

He was trying to be conservative, and further along he cautions his sister not to get excited.

“Don’t you know I have only talked as yet, but proved nothing?  Don’t you know I have never held in my hands a gold or silver bar that belonged to me?  Don’t you know that people who always feel jolly, no matter where they are or what happens to them—­who have the organ of hope preposterously developed—­who are endowed with an uncongealable, sanguine temperament—­who never feel concerned about the price of corn—­and who cannot, by any possibility, discover any but the bright side of a picture—­are very apt to go to extremes and exaggerate with a 40-horse microscopic power?

  “But—­but—­

   In the bright lexicon of youth,
   There is no such word as fail,
   and I’ll prove it.”

Whereupon he soars again, adding page after page full of glowing expectations and plans such as belong only with speculation in treasures buried in the ground—­a very difficult place, indeed, to find them.