--and this time he fairly flew at
Dusty Rhodes. He took him off to one side, where no one could listen in,
and at the end of half an hour Mr. Rhodes had signed a paper giving a
quit-claim to his interest in the mine. Old Whiskers was summoned from
his attendance on the bottles, the lawyer presented his case; and,
whatever the arguments, they prevailed also with the saloon-keeper, who
signed up and took his check. Presumably they had to do with threats of
expensive litigation and appeals to the higher courts, with a learned
exposition of the weakness of their case and the air-tight position of
Judson Eells; the point is, they prevailed, and Eells took possession of
the mine, placing Pisen-face Lynch in charge.

Old Whiskers folded his tent and returned to Blackwater, where many of
the stampeders had preceded him; and Dusty Rhodes, with a guilty grin,
folded his check and started for the railroad. Cole Campbell and his
daughter, when they heard the news and found themselves debarred from
the property, packed up and took the trail home, and when John C.
Calhoun came out of his coma he was left without a friend in the world.
The rush had passed on, across the Sink to Blackwater and to the gulches
in the mountains beyond; for the men from Nevada had not been slow to
comprehend that the Willie Meena held no promise for them.

It was a single rich blow-out in a country otherwise barren; and the
tales of the pocket miners, who held claims back of Blackwater, had led
to a second stampede. The Willie Meena was a prophecy of what might be
expected if a similar formation could be found, but it was no more than
the throat of an extinct volcano, filled up with gold-bearing quartz.
There was no fissure-vein, no great mother lode leading off through the
country for miles; only a hogback of black quartz and then worlds and
worlds of desert as barren as wash boulders could make it. So they rose
and went on, like birds in full flight after they have settled for a
moment on the plain, and when Wunpost rose up and rubbed his eyes his
great camp had passed away like a dream.

Two days later he walked wearily across the desert from Blackwater, with
a two gallon canteen under his arm, and at the entrance to Jail Canyon
he paused and looked in doubtfully before he shambled up to the house.
He was broke, and he knew it, and added to that shame was the greater
shame that comes from drink. Old Whiskers' poisonous whiskey had sapped
his self-resp