ived and toiled for twenty years, washing the dirt and
gravel of an ancient river-bed high up on the hill-top between Wolf
Creek and the Middle Yuba. He rented water from his ditch, sometimes at
the rate of two hundred and fifty dollars a month, to other miners. From
the grass roots on the hillside some lucky fellows cleaned up $10,000 in
a few days. For several years John Keeler and Will Cummins rented water
from Palmer and helped the "old man" keep his ditch in repair.

The old man lived alone, industrious, and so economical as to excite the
mirth or the pity of his rough neighbors. Some who heard that he had
loaned $60,000 to a water company at 12 per cent. interest, regarded him
contemptuously as a miser. How else explain his shabby clothes, his old
rubber boots, that were out at the toes, his life of toil and
self-denial? Palmer never gambled, nor caroused, nor spent money on
women. He attended strictly to business, bringing to the bank at Moore's
Flat from time to time gold dust of high grade, worth from $19 to $20 an
ounce. And those who bought his gold marked how rough and torn were the
old man's fingers, the nails broken and blackened and forced away from
the flesh.

But Keeler and Cummins had seen through the rough exterior. They knew
something of his charities. They had tasted his good cheer; for he kept
a well-stocked larder. They had seen with amusement his family of pet
cats seated at table with him, and each receiving its rations in due
order, like so many children. Keeler told with glee about the old man's
horse and mule, idly eating their heads off on the hillside. They had
come to Palmer in payment of a debt, and although he had had a fair
offer for the mule he had refused to sell, on the ground that without
the mule the horse would be lonesome.

Robert Palmer knew what it was to be lonesome. True, he employed a hired
man or two occasionally, and when he cleaned up his sluices he employed
several--and, let it be said, he paid good wages. There were neighbors,
but with most of them he had little in common. The Woolsey boys, at the
ranch in the bottom of the canon, whose widowed mother had come from St.
Louis to marry old Sherwood, had grown up under his kindly eye. In early
boyhood their active limbs had scaled the forbidding ledges of Fillmore
Hill, and Robert Palmer had granted them permission to hunt on his
claim.

One night in his cabin on the mountain top, when the gold dust from the
last clean