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