Page:The Overland Monthly, volume 1, issue 1.djvu/46



there was wealth, but for him fame, more glorious and coveted than mere money, was within reach.

The eventful day was sunny, calm, and lovely. The iron globe had been charged with the mysterious compound. The battery was ready to be attached by a single turn of a lever to the wires which led out into the level space where the great, rude sphere lay sleeping in the sun, holding in its iron heart its tremendous secret. Without any superflous words or dramatic gestures, such as the occasion might have called forth, Barnard mounted the little shed, through the roof of which appeared the lever that was to direct the enormous power of the battery beneath him, along the quivering wires to the silent monster lying in the dry grass, scarcely two hundred feet away. Ata safer distance from the machine, eight stockholders in the California Diamond Crystallization Company, with various feelings, but with dry jokes still uttered with their bated breath, sat upon a rail fence. The moment was sublime. Phineas Goodson said, "She biles!" Then the lever was turned in the Doctor's hand; there was a fierce rending of the air, as if heaven and earth had come together; the solid earth trembled for miles around; birds fell dead from the astonished sky, with fragments of iron and steel; Dr. Barnard ascended, it is averred, fifty feet perpendicularly in the air; then flying horizontally fifty feet, he alighted on the quaking earth with a broken thigh and sundry contusions. All this the eight stockholders on the rail fence saw before the rush of air swept them off in a heap, as a boy would brush off a row of torpid flies. The experiment was concluded, and when ranchmen came spurring in from the alarmed country roundabout, they found —not a new-born volcano or wandering earthquake, as they had expected, but a broken-limbed, broken-hearted philosopher, a field dotted with minute

fragments of an iron globe, a group of half-stunned stockholders, a torn and rent space of ground, a scattered wreck of a wooden shed and battery—but no diamonds.

I draw a curtain over the closing scenes. Inamoment of time, in a flash of electric light, the hope of a lifetime, the fruits of long and weary years of waiting, passed away as lightly as a bursted bubble. Barnard's resources and all that he could expect from his friends had gone in the general wreck of his hopes. His frame was shattered by his terrible fall; and limp and nerveless from the reaction of his overstrained organization, he relapsed into a state of apathy and stupor; the light of his eye was extinguished; his heart was quite broken. He took to his bed and for days spoke no word to any man. Rallying after a while, he persisted in his belief that he only needed an apparatus strong enough to hold the discharge of his battery, and he could yet make the diamond. It was pitiful to see the eager flush with which he would start up when arguing the certainty of success, hoping that his listeners would encourage him by word or assistance to hope for future ventures. No such word or offer ever came, and he slowly gave way under the crushing load of disappointment that weighed him down. With the rainy season of autumn, gloom shut in around him, and though the old hope flashed up occasionally from the embers of his expiring fires, the ashes slowly covered his heart, and he passed into a condition in which he seemed wavering between life and death. Once ina while of a bright occasional day in winter his shrunken form was seen sunning itself at the doorway of his little house in the ragged outskirts of the city. But consumption, which had long been seated in his system, rapidly brought him down to death. His devoted wife, thinner and paler than of yore, but quiet and gentle, ministered to every want, and bore un