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Semanticate
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<p>Still unconvinced, Schieffelin showed his specimens to twenty or thirty other mining men who might reasonably be assumed to have expert knowledge. All pronounced the ore of little value. The verdict seemed unanimous.</p>
<p>“Better forget your bonanza and go to work,” suggested Brother Al.</p>
<p>Schieffelin, in a fit of disillusion, stepped to the cabin door and hurled his specimens one by one as far as he could throw them out on the hill. He was on the point of throwing away a whole splendid future in one mad impulse, but restrained himself in time and saved three pieces of ore. Gloomy and disgusted, he went to work in the McCracken mine and wielded a pick and shovel for four weeks.</p>
<p>The miners at Signal sometimes referred to Richard Gird, who recently had arrived to assume the position of mining and mechanical engineer and assayer at the properties, as “the famous <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Gird.” He had had an extensive mining experience, and his reputation as an expert had preceded him. A dour, hard-featured, hardheaded, competent man was the famous <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Gird, without a drop of romance in his practical soul, his shrewd gray eyes looking upon adventure only as an opportunity to make money, but with a gambler’s cold nerve in his willingness to take risks in a game for big stakes.</p>
<p>The early dusk of a winter afternoon was darkening the windows of Gird’s office. A draft of cold air as the door opened accompanied a sound of boots scraping on the floor. Working at his desk by lamplight, Gird looked up. Before him stood a bearded young giant, evidently painfully embarrassed. Well? Schieffelin laid his three remaining specimens on the desk. Everybody had said they were no good, but he wanted to know for sure; then he could sleep better of nights. Would <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Gird take a look at them? And did he think them worth assaying? Gird picked up the pieces and turned them over in his hands. A sudden gleam kindled in his eyes and as suddenly died out. Well, yes, he would assay them. Fine. He could send word of the result by Brother Al who was on night shift and could call at the office any afternoon after work was over. Ed himself was working days.</p>
<p>The miners at Signal sometimes referred to Richard Gird, who recently had arrived to assume the position of mining and mechanical engineer and assayer at the properties, as “the famous <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> Gird.” He had had an extensive mining experience, and his reputation as an expert had preceded him. A dour, hard-featured, hardheaded, competent man was the famous <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> Gird, without a drop of romance in his practical soul, his shrewd gray eyes looking upon adventure only as an opportunity to make money, but with a gambler’s cold nerve in his willingness to take risks in a game for big stakes.</p>
<p>The early dusk of a winter afternoon was darkening the windows of Gird’s office. A draft of cold air as the door opened accompanied a sound of boots scraping on the floor. Working at his desk by lamplight, Gird looked up. Before him stood a bearded young giant, evidently painfully embarrassed. Well? Schieffelin laid his three remaining specimens on the desk. Everybody had said they were no good, but he wanted to know for sure; then he could sleep better of nights. Would <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> Gird take a look at them? And did he think them worth assaying? Gird picked up the pieces and turned them over in his hands. A sudden gleam kindled in his eyes and as suddenly died out. Well, yes, he would assay them. Fine. He could send word of the result by Brother Al who was on night shift and could call at the office any afternoon after work was over. Ed himself was working days.</p>
<p>Ed Schieffelin was sleeping soundly in his bunk a few nights later when Brother Al came bustling and stamping into the cabin and shook him vigorously by the shoulder.</p>
<p>“Get up, Ed,” said Brother Al quite out of breath. “<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Gird wants to see you right away in his office. Come on now. Hurry up.”</p>
<p>“Get up, Ed,” said Brother Al quite out of breath. “<abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> Gird wants to see you right away in his office. Come on now. Hurry up.”</p>
<p>“I’ve assayed your ore,” said Gird when the two brothers arrived at the office. “One piece runs $2,000 to the ton, another $600, and the third only $40. You can’t always estimate the richness of a lode by two or three samples of rock. But I’m convinced you’ve made a strike. Where is your claim?</p>
<p>“Over on the San Pedro.”</p>
<p>“That’s not very definite.”</p>
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<p>“To hell with my position!” snapped Gird.</p>
<p>The question of the time for starting came up. Gird thought they had better wait until the warm weather of spring had opened the trails.</p>
<p>“No.” Schieffelin banged his fist on the table. “We’ll start now.”</p>
<p>The famous <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Gird was slightly taken aback by this imperious vehemence. No immediate rush seemed necessary. He had certain affairs to be arranged, certain business matters that⁠—</p>
<p>The famous <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> Gird was slightly taken aback by this imperious vehemence. No immediate rush seemed necessary. He had certain affairs to be arranged, certain business matters that⁠—</p>
<p>“Right now,” thundered Schieffelin. “Or never.”</p>
<p>So preparations for an immediate departure were made. Gird resigned; the company, in an effort to hold him, offered him the general superintendency of the mines, but he refused it. Gird bought a secondhand blue spring wagon and loaded it with provisions, cooking equipment, and firearms, including in the cargo his assay outfit and a surveyor’s transit and level. He also purchased a mule which, paired with Schieffelin’s, made the team. As the three men were ready to pull out, the noon whistle at the mines blew for dinner. Gird and Brother Al wanted to take time to eat. Ed Schieffelin refused to wait for food or anything else. Then prudent Brother Al changed his mind at the last moment and decided he wouldn’t go; he was dubious about leaving a good job at $4 a day. Without a word either of anger or persuasion, Ed Schieffelin whipped up his mules and left Brother Al standing lonely and wistful behind. So Ed Schieffelin and Gird, in the first week of <time datetime="1878-02">February, 1878</time>, started for the San Pedro. Brother Al joined them on horseback at their first night’s camp at Dripping Spring; the lure of bonanza had changed his mind again.</p>
<p>Past Martinez, Hassayampa, Wickenburg into Salt River Valley, their route led them, across Salt River at Hayden’s Ferry, on through Tempe to Maricopa, where they struck the old Overland stage trail, and so to Tucson. They were entering the Apache country now. The old stage station at Pantano bore the bullet scars of a recent attack. They doused their camp fire at night, spread their blankets at a distance from their wagon and mules, and at daybreak climbed to a hilltop to search the country with field glasses for any sign of red marauders. Beyond the old Ohnersorgen stage station where they crossed the San Pedro, they found the fresh graves of two men murdered by Indians. Up the east bank of the San Pedro through the new Mormon settlement of <abbr>St.</abbr> David, on past the present site of Fairbank, they came at last to the old Brunckow house in sight of the Tombstone hills. Here they made permanent camp, and Gird built a crude assay furnace in the corner fireplace with old adobe bricks and a sheet of iron.</p>
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<p>The period of discovery was drawing to a close; the time of consolidation and development was at hand. News of the strike spread abroad; crowds of adventurers took the trail for the hills; the town of Tombstone evolved overnight, as if out of thin air, to become one of the greatest silver camps of the West. Mining machinery was freighted in, stamp mills for reducing ore sprang up, bullion began to flood out across the desert to world markets.</p>
<p>Gird and the Schieffelins jumped at the first chance to sell the Contention for $10,000; the purchasers took millions from it. The three partners sold a half interest in the Lucky Cuss, but the other half, retained for years, poured a steady stream of money into their coffers. The two Schieffelins sold their two thirds of the Tough Nut group for a million dollars; Gird sold his one third later for an equal sum. Gird long remained in the country building his fortune to greater proportions; the Schieffelins took their departure. The two brothers had come into the hills almost penniless; they went out millionaires.</p>
<p>Flushed with achievement, rich, famous, still young, Ed Schieffelin turned to civilization to prospect for new adventures. Civilization to him was little more than a name; he had glimpsed its peaks only from far off; he might find misery there or strike it rich in happiness; he would see what it held for him. He went to New York and lived there for a time; passed on to Chicago, Washington, other cities; travelled extensively; met many distinguished people. Everywhere this picturesque young plutocrat with his background of romance was lionized.</p>
<p>But fortune and adulations made no change in him; he remained always the same simplehearted, kindly, sympathetic soul, helping poor relations and old friends generously, responding to every appeal for charity, his hand forever in his pockets. For a summer, he flitted to the Yukon in a steamer built at his own expense, on an unsuccessful hunt for gold. On his return, he married <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Mary E. Brown and built a mansion for his bride in Alameda on San Francisco Bay. He purchased a residence in Los Angeles later, and, with his wife, father, and Brother Al to share its comforts, relaxed into tranquil domesticity, Brother Al dying here in <time datetime="1885">1885</time>.</p>
<p>But fortune and adulations made no change in him; he remained always the same simplehearted, kindly, sympathetic soul, helping poor relations and old friends generously, responding to every appeal for charity, his hand forever in his pockets. For a summer, he flitted to the Yukon in a steamer built at his own expense, on an unsuccessful hunt for gold. On his return, he married <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mrs.</abbr> Mary E. Brown and built a mansion for his bride in Alameda on San Francisco Bay. He purchased a residence in Los Angeles later, and, with his wife, father, and Brother Al to share its comforts, relaxed into tranquil domesticity, Brother Al dying here in <time datetime="1885">1885</time>.</p>
<p>But civilization had failed to drug his memories of old wilderness days. He was a wilderness man, bred to its solitudes, trained to its primitive conditions. Born in a coal-mining region in Pennsylvania, he had gone as an infant with his parents to a gold-mining region in Oregon. His earliest recollections were of washing sands for gold with a milk pan in a creek that meandered past the family log cabin. At twelve he had run away to join the gold rush to Salmon River; an old family friend had captured him and led him home by the ear. He had started out on his own as a prospector and miner at seventeen. For years there was hardly a mining stampede in the Western country in which he had not shared, hardly a boom camp in Oregon, California, Nevada, Idaho, Utah, Colorado in which he had not tried his luck. Deserts and mountains had been home to him; on their lonely trails he had found happiness.</p>
<p>For twenty years since he had stood in thrilling triumph beside his newfound riches in the Tombstone hills, he had heard the still small insistent voice of the wilderness calling him back. He had assayed civilization and found only disillusion. The pleasures of wealth were not in its possession, but in the adventure of finding it. Society, with its pride, pretense, jealousies, and vainglory, was for others. Sweeter far to him were camp fire bacon and coffee in a desert than the luxuries of cities. One lonely purple mountain was worth all the world’s Broadways. So the rich man laid off his fine raiment, put on his old corduroys and his old red flannel shirt, buckled on his old canteen, and, with his old pick on his shoulder, went home to the wilderness.</p>
<p>Night had fallen in the Oregon forest. Schieffelin sat alone in his cabin in the ruddy glow of the firelight shining through the chinks of the stove. A pot of beans was boiling and bubbling with a cozy, cheerful murmur, sending up a cloud of savoury steam. A pan of biscuits was baking in the oven.⁠ ⁠… A sudden blinding effulgence filled the cabin. Out of the heavens, through the night, a long beam of splendour was slanting down to him, like a wide, gleaming pathway. Far up along its dazzling reaches he saw with a quick glow of happiness the loom of the Tombstone hills; there were the Lucky Cuss, the Contention, the Tough Nut, all his old mines as plain as day. Beyond, against a radiant suffusion of silver light, towered a great gateway flashing as with opals and sapphire and gold, and from its wide-flung portals were streaming glorious winged figures with snowy, shimmering garments; they were coming toward him, their arms outstretched as in welcome. He started from his chair, his rapt eyes filled with the wonder of the vision, his face transfigured and glorified. With his old corduroy pants stuffed in his boots, his old red flannel shirt open at the throat, its sleeves rolled to the elbows, he stumbled forward to climb the resplendent pathway leading to the skies.</p>
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