s from here--who'll run from morning till night
collecting material cheaper? I'll write a short letter twice a week,
for the present, for the "Age," for $5 per week. Now it has been a
long time since I couldn't make my own living, and it shall be a long
time before I loaf another year."

This all led to nothing, but about the same time the "Enterprise"
assistant already mentioned spoke to Joseph T. Goodman, owner and editor
of the paper, about adding "Josh" to their regular staff. "Joe" Goodman,
a man of keen humor and literary perception, agreed that the author of
the "Josh" letters might be useful to them. One of the sketches
particularly appealed to him--a burlesque report of a Fourth of July
oration.

"That is the kind of thing we want," he said. "Write to him, Barstow,
and ask him if he wants to come up here."

Barstow wrote, offering twenty-five dollars a week--a tempting sum. This
was at the end of July, 1862.

Yet the hard-pressed miner made no haste to accept the offer. To leave
Aurora meant the surrender of all hope in the mines, the confession of
another failure. He wrote Barstow, asking when he thought he might be
needed. And at the same time, in a letter to Orion, he said:

"I shall leave at midnight to-night, alone and on foot, for a walk of
sixty or seventy miles through a totally uninhabited country. But
do you write Barstow that I have left here for a week or so, and, in
case he should want me, he must write me here, or let me know
through you."

He had gone into the wilderness to fight out his battle alone, postponing
the final moment of surrender--surrender that, had he known, only meant
the beginning of victory. He was still undecided when he returned eight
days later and wrote to his sister Pamela a letter in which there is no
mention of newspaper prospects.

Just how and when the end came at last cannot be known; but one hot,
dusty August afternoon, in Virginia City, a worn, travel-stained pilgrim
dragged himself into the office of the "Territorial Enterprise," then in
its new building on C Street, and, loosening a heavy roll of blankets
from his shoulder, dropped wearily into a chair. He wore a rusty slouch
hat, no coat, a faded blue-flannel shirt, a navy revolver; his trousers
were tucked into his boot-tops; a tangle of reddish-brown hair fell on
his shoulders; a mass of tawny beard, dingy with alkali dust, dropped
half-way to his waist.

Aurora lay one hundre