ing pellets of unimpeachable "native" silver. Nobody had ever
heard of such a thing before; science could not account for such a queer
novelty. The stock rose to sixty-five dollars a foot, and at this figure
the world-renowned tragedian, McKean Buchanan, bought a commanding
interest and prepared to quit the stage once more--he was always doing
that. And then it transpired that the mine had been "salted"--and not in
any hackneyed way, either, but in a singularly bold, barefaced and
peculiarly original and outrageous fashion. On one of the lumps of
"native" silver was discovered the minted legend, "TED STATES OF," and
then it was plainly apparent that the mine had been "salted" with melted
half-dollars! The lumps thus obtained had been blackened till they
resembled native silver, and were then mixed with the shattered rock in
the bottom of the shaft. It is literally true. Of course the price of
the stock at once fell to nothing, and the tragedian was ruined. But for
this calamity we might have lost McKean Buchanan from the stage.

CHAPTER XLV.

The "flush times" held bravely on. Something over two years before, Mr.
Goodman and another journeyman printer, had borrowed forty dollars and
set out from San Francisco to try their fortunes in the new city of
Virginia. They found the Territorial Enterprise, a poverty-stricken
weekly journal, gasping for breath and likely to die. They bought it,
type, fixtures, good-will and all, for a thousand dollars, on long time.
The editorial sanctum, news-room, press-room, publication office,
bed-chamber, parlor, and kitchen were all compressed into one apartment
and it was a small one, too. The editors and printers slept on the
floor, a Chinaman did their cooking, and the "imposing-stone" was the
general dinner table. But now things were changed. The paper was a
great daily, printed by steam; there were five editors and twenty-three
compositors; the subscription price was sixteen dollars a year; the
advertising rates were exorbitant, and the columns crowded. The paper
was clearing from six to ten thousand dollars a month, and the
"Enterprise Building" was finished and ready for occupation--a stately
fireproof brick. Every day from five all the way up to eleven columns
of "live" advertisements were left out or crowded into spasmodic and
irregular "supplements."

The "Gould & Curry" company were erecting a monster hundred-stamp mill at
a cost that ultimately fell littl