41 Lure O Gold 1904

"
My Burden of
Treasure
be nursed by my mother and be given proper diet and
attention. As soon as he sailed it was the most de
pressing morning of my existence
I hired men and
set to work constructing sluice-boxes, as I wanted to
hasten the washing.
ing outfit, and soon was cleaning up every night from
I bought sea-water from a pump
my riffle-box four times the amount of gold that it would
have been possible to wash in the rocker in a single day.
In six weeks I had washed out the last shovelful of the
pay-streak, and after settling accounts with my men
and paying my water bill and other expenses I had
left, as nearly as I could compute it on my gold scales,
a little over $41,000 worth of dust.
And now on the morrow I would be aboard ship
bright and early and off for dear old San Francisco, to
surprise my good people
what our little strip
with the wonderful tale of
of beach sand had washed out.
There it was in that box in the landlord s closet a
fortune.
Not a large fortune, but enough for me and
mine for the rest of our days. And it represented to
me more than the mere dust in the box. It represented
four years at Stanford, a trip to Europe, a home-com
ing, a settling
world,"
down to
the one honest business in the
as
my father had called that of mining, in which,
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