There was little doubt that the Lone Star claim was "played out."Not dug out, worked out, washed out, but PLAYED out.For two years its five sanguine proprietors had gone through the various stages of mining enthusiasm; had prospected and planned, dug and doubted.
They had borrowed money with hearty but unredeeming frankness, established a credit with unselfish abnegation of all responsibility, and had borne the disappointment of their creditors with a cheerful resignation which only the consciousness of some deep Compensating Future could give.Giving little else, however, a singular dissatisfaction obtained with the traders, and, being accompanied with a reluctance to make further advances, at last touched the gentle stoicism of the proprietors themselves.The youthful enthusiasm which had at first lifted the most ineffectual trial, the most useless essay, to the plane of actual achievement, died out, leaving them only the dull, prosaic record of half-finished ditches, purposeless shafts, untenable pits, abandoned engines, and meaningless disruptions of the soil upon the Lone Star claim, and empty flour sacks and pork barrels in the Lone Star cabin.
They had borne their poverty, if that term could be applied to a light renunciation of all superfluities in food, dress, or ornament, ameliorated by the gentle depredations already alluded to, with unassuming levity.More than that: having segregated themselves from their fellow-miners of Red Gulch, and entered upon the possession of the little manzanita-thicketed valley five miles away, the failure of their enterprise had assumed in their eyes only the vague significance of the decline and fall of a general community, and to that extent relieved them of individual responsibility.It was easier for them to admit that the Lone Star claim was "played out" than confess to a personal bankruptcy.
Moreover, they still retained the sacred right of criticism of government, and rose superior in their private opinions to their own collective wisdom.Each one experienced a grateful sense of the entire responsibility of the other four in the fate of their enterprise.
On December 24, 1863, a gentle rain was still falling over the length and breadth of the Lone Star claim.It had been falling for several days, had already called a faint spring color to the wan landscape, repairing with tender touches the ravages wrought by the proprietors, or charitably covering their faults.The ragged seams in gulch and canyon lost their harsh outlines, a thin green mantle faintly clothed the torn and abraded hillside.A few weeks more, and a veil of forgetfulness would be drawn over the feeble failures of the Lone Star claim.The charming derelicts themselves, listening to the raindrops on the roof of their little cabin, gazed philosophically from the open door, and accepted the prospect as a moral discharge from their obligations.Four of the five partners were present.The Right and Left Bowers, Union Mills, and the Judge.
It is scarcely necessary to say that not one of these titles was the genuine name of its possessor.The Right and Left Bowers were two brothers; their sobriquets, a cheerful adaptation from the favorite game of euchre, expressing their relative value in the camp.The mere fact that Union Mills had at one time patched his trousers with an old flour sack legibly bearing that brand of its fabrication, was a tempting baptismal suggestion that the other partners could not forego.The Judge, a singularly inequitable Missourian, with no knowledge whatever of the law, was an inspiration of gratuitous irony.
Union Mills, who had been for some time sitting placidly on the threshold with one leg exposed to the rain, from a sheer indolent inability to change his position, finally withdrew that weather-beaten member, and stood up.The movement more or less deranged the attitudes of the other partners, and was received with cynical disfavor.It was somewhat remarkable that, although generally giving the appearance of healthy youth and perfect physical condition, they one and all simulated the decrepitude of age and invalidism, and after limping about for a few moments, settled back again upon their bunks and stools in their former positions.The Left Bower lazily replaced a bandage that he had worn around his ankle for weeks without any apparent necessity, and the Judge scrutinized with tender solicitude the faded cicatrix of a scratch upon his arm.A passive hypochondria, born of their isolation, was the last ludicrously pathetic touch to their situation.
The immediate cause of this commotion felt the necessity of an explanation.
"It would have been just as easy for you to have stayed outside with your business leg, instead of dragging it into private life in that obtrusive way," retorted the Right Bower; "but that exhaustive effort isn't going to fill the pork barrel.The grocery man at Dalton says--what's that he said?" he appealed lazily to the Judge.
"Said he reckoned the Lone Star was about played out, and he didn't want any more in his--thank you!" repeated the Judge with a mechanical effort of memory utterly devoid of personal or present interest.
"I always suspected that man, after Grimshaw begun to deal with him," said the Left Bower."They're just mean enough to join hands against us." It was a fixed belief of the Lone Star partners that they were pursued by personal enmities.
"More than likely those new strangers over in the Fork have been paying cash and filled him up with conceit," said Union Mills, trying to dry his leg by alternately beating it or rubbing it against the cabin wall."Once begin wrong with that kind of snipe and you drag everybody down with you."This vague conclusion was received with dead silence.Everybody had become interested in the speaker's peculiar method of drying his leg, to the exclusion of the previous topic.A few offered criticism, no one assistance.
