They went to Goldfield. Shorty showed the sample to Bob Montgomery, an old friend. Bob was skeptical. But in an hour the news was out and Goldfield en masse headed for the new strike. Those, who couldn’t get conveyances, walked. Some pulled burro carts across the desert. Some started out with wheelbarrows. Jack Salsbury began to move lumber. Others brought merchandise, barrels of liquor. Everything to build a town. “Specimens of my ore,” Shorty said, “were used by Tiffany for ring settings, lavallieres, bracelets. It went to Paris and London. Ore broken from the ledge sold for $50 a pound. I must have given away thousands of dollars’ worth of it for souvenirs.” Overnight Rhyolite was born. Shorty bought a barrel of liquor, drove a row of nails around the barrel, hung tin dippers on the nails and invited the town to quench its thirst. Two railroads came. One, 114 miles from Las Vegas. Another, 200 miles from Ludlow. “Two things influenced me in naming it Bullfrog,” Shorty said. “Ed had asked, ‘what’ll we name it?’ As I looked at the green ore in my hand, a frog bellowed. ‘Bullfrog,’ I said.” (One writer has stated erroneously that there is not a bullfrog on the desert.) The tycoons of mining and their agents appeared as if borne on magic carpets and in a little while men who would have turned him from their doors, were fawning around the little man with the golden smile and the ugly brawl for the Bullfrog was on—a struggle between cheap promoters who gave him cheap whiskey and moguls who gave him champagne. Scores of yarns have been written about the sale of the Bullfrog. It was one of the few things in Shorty’s life which he discussed with reserve. In my residence two years before he died and in my presence he told my wife, to whom he was singularly devoted, the sordid story. “Cross had a good head,” Shorty said. “He attended to business, sold his interest and retired to a good ranch. “I woke up one morning and judging from the empties, I must have had a grand evening. I reached for a full pint on the table and under it was a piece of paper with a note. I read it and learned for the first time that I’d sold the Bullfrog.” “The law would have released you from that contract,” I said. “I’d signed it,” he answered quietly. I thought of the crumbling adobe on the Ballarat flat and the lean years that followed. “At that, I got good money for a fellow like me,” he added. “I’ve never wanted for anything.” A fortune blown like a bubble meant absolutely nothing—stopped no laugh; dimmed no hope; quenched no fire in his eager eyes. “If I’d got those millions the big boys would have hauled me off to town, put a white shirt on me. Maybe they would have made me believe Shorty Harris was important. ‘Mr. Harris this and Mr. Harris that.’ I’ve got something they can’t take away. I step out of my cabin every morning and look it over—100 miles of outdoors. All mine.”