For example, there was Robert Palmer, who after thirty years spent in the gold fields had accumulated considerable treasure. But choosing to dig for gold and to live among adventurers, thieves, and speculators, he had come to distrust human nature. He became so secretive that even at the approach of death, when the kindly French doctor had given him fair warning, he would confide in only one man. Verily, he had his reward. Incidentally, the three Californians whom he had named as his executors prospered. They may not all be included among the forty-one thieves of this story, but it may not seem unreasonable to suppose that Henry Francis made it worth while for Hintzen and Haggerty to keep quiet. The point is that all three executors prospered--and then died penniless. Hintzen made so much money over at Forest City that he left for Arizona, where he invested in copper, and lost everything he had. Haggerty, who remained in his store at Moore's Flat, where he had made money rapidly, speculated and lost all, including the savings of a few poor people who had trusted him. Henry Francis speculated in the stock of the famous Comstock mine, in the adjoining State of Nevada, lost the fortune he had wrongfully acquired, and died broken-hearted. It was only six years after Palmer's death that he collapsed, and was taken home to Reedsville, Pennsylvania. Here, ostensibly the victim of tuberculosis, he lingered a year to taste the bitterness of poverty and wretchedness. Then he died, and suffered the usual eulogy poured out by country ministers. A charitable author must admit the virtues of his "heavy-villain." The sun rises upon the evil and the good, and rain descends upon the just and the unjust, for the simple reason, no doubt, that no other arrangement would be possible, inasmuch as there are no people who are entirely good and none who are wholly bad. In every man the forces of good and evil are at war. If Henry Francis yielded to temptation there were extenuating circumstances. In the first place, Robert Palmer's will distinctly stated that everything was left to the judgment of the executors. They were to stand firm and resolute on their own judgment "and take time to settle the concern whether it need one year or twenty years." Possibly Francis reasoned that investing the old man's money in a certain way would, within a very few years, double the estate, and thus render a service to the heirs. And if at the end of three or four years the event had proved the soundness of his judgment, was it wrong to exercise that judgment in further ventures? The will gave him twenty years. Weren't the executors acting "at all times and under all circumstances to the best of their judgment?" If conscience demurred that Hintzen and Haggerty were left in the dark, so that "their judgment" had come to mean simply the judgment of Henry Francis, had he not proved that judgment good?