Page:Hard-pan; a story of bonanza fortunes (IA hardpanbonanza00bonnrich).pdf/43

Rh was partly accidental and partly owing to his inability to realize that such a state of affairs could be anything but a public misfortune. The colonel had the distinction of having collapsed in a most tremendous and complete manner, and he was proud of it. His case was quoted to inquiring tourist and ambitious native as a star example of money-getting and money-losing in the State of California. His passage from affluence to poverty was still a story worth telling and hearing. It was all in the superlative degree, for the colonel had never done anything by halves. His prosperity had been as extravagantly splendid as his adversity was characteristically complete.

He had made the bulk of his fortune in those years of the fat kine from 1870 to 1875. Before that he had been well-to-do, as every man could be in the San Francisco that developed between the days when "the water came up to Montgomery Street" and the inauguration of the Comstock boom. He had been a figure in the city from the earliest times, had known San Francisco when it was a straggling line of houses edging the muddy shores of the bay, with a trail winding through the chaparral over the dunes to the Mission Dolores. He had climbed the lupine-covered slopes of what is now California Street, and looked down on the hundreds of deserted ships that lay rotting in the