upply, for we were grateful."

The Indians left them unharmed, and the prospective millionaires moved
on. Across that two hundred miles to the Humboldt country they pushed,
arriving at the little camp of Unionville at the end of eleven weary
days.

In "Roughing It" Mark Twain has told us of Unionville and the mining
experience there. Their cabin was a three-sided affair with a cotton
roof. Stones rolled down the mountainside on them; also, the author
says, a mule and a cow.

The author could not gather fortune in a basket, as he had dreamed.
Masses of gold and silver were not lying about. He gathered a back-load
of yellow, glittering specimens, but they proved worthless. Gold in the
rough did not glitter, and was not yellow. Tillou instructed the others
in prospecting, and they went to work with pick and shovel--then with
drill and blasting-powder. The prospect of immediately becoming
millionaires vanished.

"One week of this satisfied me. I resigned," is Mark Twain's brief
comment.

The Humboldt reports had been exaggerated. The Clemens-Clagget-Oliver-
Tillou millionaire combination soon surrendered its claims. Clemens and
Tillou set out for Carson City with a Prussian named Pfersdorff, who
nearly got them drowned and got them completely lost in the snow before
they arrived there. Oliver and Clagget remained in Unionville, began law
practice, and were elected to office. It is not known what became of the
wagon and horses and the two dogs.

It was the end of January when our miner returned to Carson. He was not
discouraged--far from it. He believed he had learned something that
would be useful to him in a camp where mines were a reality. Within a
few weeks from his return we find him at Aurora, in the Esmeralda region,
on the edge of California. It was here that the Clemens brothers owned
the 1,650 feet formerly mentioned. He had came down to work it.

It was the dead of winter, but he was full of enthusiasm, confident of a
fortune by early summer. To Pamela he wrote:

"I expect to return to St. Louis in July--per steamer. I don't say
that I will return then, or that I shall be able to do it--but I
expect to--you bet . . . . If nothing goes wrong, we'll strike
the ledge in June."

He was trying to be conservative, and further along he cautions his
sister not to get excited.

"Don't you know I have only talked as yet, but proved nothing? Don't
you know I have never held in my hands a gold o