Forty-one Thieves / A Tale of California

Man

the end of a rainbow. He was already a man of experience and settled habits, inured to hardship and adverse fortune. As a youth he had left his native hills of Connecticut, to sell clocks, first in the South and then in the lumber camps of Michigan. There, the business of Yankee pedlar having failed, he found himself stranded. His father was a prosperous farmer; but a stepmoth

,-living to the age of a hundred and four years,-saw the wilderness he had loved and explored for eighty years transformed to a proud empire. Enos had guided Fremont through Wyoming. It is rather too bad that Palmer could not have accom

Yankee shrewdness saw larger profits in hay and cattle than in washing gravel. But certainly his New England integrity

every day in the Sacramento Valley. But land titles were so uncertain that in 1853 he turned to mining,-at Jefferson, on the South Yuba. He prospered to such an extent that by 1859 he had sent $8,000 back to Connecticut to pay his debts; and he ha

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

er. 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 ba

amily 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 o

There were neighbors, but with most of them he had little in common. The Woolsey boys, at the ranch in the bottom of the ca?on, whose widowed mother had come from St. Louis to marry old Sherwo

awn pistols they demanded his money. He said he had none. It was useless to resist, so he let them bind him hand and foot. Again they demanded his money. Again he said he had none. They knew better, and they threatened to burn him alive in his cabin. But Palmer was firm. Then they burnt his legs with a hot poker, and threatened to shoot him, as they migh

er, do yo

h knowledge meant

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ons concerning several of his worthless neighbors; but to

nd one niece secured five hundred dollars by sharp practice worse than robbery. Robert Palmer made the mistake that many an unselfish man has made, the mistake that insurance companies insist is wisdom: he labored to provide others with gold, as though gold were a substitute for thrift, prudence, and self-reliance. Never mind, the old fellow did nephews and nieces no harm, though he disappointed several who had depended upon him to

time this meant a trip of forty miles into the mountains by stage and on horseback from the line of the newly constructed railroad; for the narrow gauge from Colfax to Nevada City was not built until 1876. It was a happy day fo

al days they worked together in the mine; and when at last the hour of parting came, Robert Palmer sent by his nephew a present to his grandnephews in Washington, the astronomer's three small sons. It was the gold mined in those nine day