When it came to Griselda Popley, I was down to bedrock and showing no color.

What I mean is, I wasn't getting anyplace.  The only thing I'd learned since leaving the Cumberland in Tennessee was how to work a gold placer claim, but I was doing no better with that than I was with Griselda.

Her pa, Frank Popley, had a claim just a whoop and a holler down canyon from me.  He had put down a shaft on a flat bench at the bend of the creek and he was down a ways and making a fair clean-up.

He was scraping rock down there and panning out sixty to seventy dollars a day, and one time he found a crack where the gold had seeped through and filled in a space under a layer of rock, and he cleaned out six hundred dollars in four or five minutes.

It sure does beat all how prosperity makes a man critical of all who are less prosperous.  Seems like some folks no sooner get two dollars they can rattle together than they start looking down their noses at folks who only have two bits.

We were right friendly while Popley was sinking his shaft, but as soon as he began bringing up gold he started giving me advice and talking me down to Griselda.  From the way he cut up, you'd have thought it was some ability or knowledge of his that put that gold there.  I never saw a man get superior so fast.

He was running me down and talking up that Arvie Wilt who had a claim nearby the Popley place, and Arvie was a man I didn't cotton to.

He was two inches taller than my six feet and three, and where I pack one hundred and eighty pounds on that lean a frame, most of it in my chest, shoulders, and arms, Arvie weighed a good fifty pounds more and he swaggered it around as if almighty impressed with himself.

He was a big, easy-smiling man that folks took to right off, and it took them a while to learn he was a man with a streak of meanness in him that was nigh onto downright viciousness.  Trouble was, a body never saw that mean streak unless he was in a bind, but when trouble came to him, the meanness came out.

But Arvie was panning out gold, and you'd be surprised how that increased his social standing there on Horse Collar Creek.

Night after night he was over to the Popleys', putting his big feet under their table and being waited on by Griselda.  Time to time I was there, too, but they talked gold and how much they weighed out each day while all I was weighing out was gravel.

He was panning a fine show of color and all I had was a .44 pistol gun, a Henry rifle, and my mining tools.  And as we all know it's the high card in a man's hand to be holding money when he goes a-courting.