"Oh, hell, Jim, I won't do it; I'm freezing!"
"Just one more pail, Sam," he pleaded.
"No, sir, not a drop, not if I knew there were a million dollars in that
pan."
Gillis tore a page out of his note-book, and hastily posted a thirty-day
claim notice by the pan of dirt, and they set out for Angel's Camp. It
kept on raining and storming, and they did not go back. A few days later
a letter from Steve Gillis made Clemens decide to return to San
Francisco. With Jim Gillis and Dick Stoker he left Angel's and walked
across the mountains to Jackass Hill in the snow-storm--"the first I ever
saw in California," he says in his notes.
In the mean time the rain had washed away the top of the pan of earth
they had left standing on the hillside, and exposed a handful of
nuggets-pure gold. Two strangers, Austrians, had come along and,
observing it, had sat down to wait until the thirty-day claim notice
posted by Jim Gillis should expire. They did not mind the rain--not with
all that gold in sight--and the minute the thirty days were up they
followed the lead a few pans farther and took out--some say ten, some say
twenty, thousand dollars. In either case it was a good pocket. Mark
Twain missed it by one pail of water. Still, it is just as well,
perhaps, when one remembers that vaster nugget of Angel's Camp--the
Jumping Frog. Jim Gillis always declared, "If Sam had got that pocket he
would have remained a pocket-miner to the end of his days, like me.
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