Page:Memoirs of Henry Villard, volume 1.djvu/144

118 became the subject of frequent discussion. This dispelling of all my confident and high-flown personal expectations gave me also the “blues.” In this mood of mind, on the second Sunday in May, I was sitting in the Express Office, in company with Dr. Fox and Joseph Heywood, a well-known Californian, formerly of Cincinnati. We were just discussing the unpromising aspect of affairs when a short, slender, heavily-bearded individual, in miner's garb, entered the room and inquired for letters. He was invited to a seat, and soon got to talking about the resources of the country. Contrary to expectation, he seemed to believe firmly in its mineral wealth. Being asked for his experience in the mountains, from which he claimed to have just arrived, he stated, after a few moments of apparent hesitation, that a little more than a week before, while following up the north fork of Clear Creek, a tributary of the South Platte, in company with John H. Gregory and several others, he had discovered gold-bearing dirt in the vicinity of streaks of quartz rock, that ran over the mountains, in a ravine adjoining the valley of the creek. The dirt, he asserted, had yielded him as much as a dollar's worth of gold to the pan. Perceiving a manifestation of incredulity on the part of his listeners, he produced, in corroboration of his statement, a bottle containing about forty dollars worth of flour gold, and also several fragments of a hard substance which he designated as decomposed gold-bearing quartz. Mr. Heywood stepped out-doors with one of the pieces for the purpose of examining it with a magnifying-glass. He soon called out Dr. Fox, whom he told that the specimen he held in his hand was as fine quartz as he had seen in the richest quartz veins in California. Several persons having, in the meantime, entered the office and shown, upon hearing the miner's tale, a disposition to doubt its truthfulness, the latter grew rather excited, repeated what he had said, and asserted most emphatically that he would warrant one dollar to the pan of dirt to any number of men who would follow him