It was the difference between six hundred men owning a house and five thousand owning it.

We would have been millionaires if we had only worked with pick and spade one little day on our property and so secured our ownership! It reads like a wild fancy sketch, but the evidence of many witnesses, and likewise that of the official records of Esmeralda District, is easily obtainable in proof that it is a true history.

I can always have it to say that I was absolutely and unquestionably worth a million dollars, once, for ten days.
A year ago my esteemed and in every way estimable old millionaire partner, Higbie, wrote me from an obscure little mining camp in California that after nine or ten years of buffetings and hard striving, he was at last in a position where he could command twenty-five hundred dollars, and said he meant to go into the fruit business in a modest way.
How such a thought would have insulted him the night we lay in our cabin planning European trips and brown stone houses on Russian Hill!.