What an exciting place it was! It reminded me of another primitive community in Nevada, Virginia City, which I had visited twenty years earlier. Here were the same lack of civilization, utter abandon, tent houses by the hundreds, a few straggling brick and adobe buildings and the inevitable long street running from end to end of the town. On this occasion the street was filled with a howling mob of men and women--rabid fight fans. Scores of derricks and piles and piles of ore dumped on the sides of operating mines, not to mention hundreds of prospects and claims, told the veriest stranger that here was a mining town. Every other door led into a gambling house or a saloon. As you contemplated the arid desert utterly devoid of vegetation, hemmed in by huge mountains themselves great uplifts of barren rock, you marvelled at the courage of the first man who made bold to enter that land of devastation and dust. To see that transplanted Brocken scene trodden by people from every part of the globe made me stop and ponder. What will man not do for gold? To be sure a greater part of this mob was attracted to Goldfield by the fight; but the aftermath was horrible to contemplate, the time when only those remained who gambled on what they hoped to find under the crust called earth. I realized that truly this was the country of the survival of the fittest. [Illustration: AS CAMEO KIRBY _I never played a character I liked so well_] A mining camp is a cesspool in which the unfortunate ones wish for death and a mecca for a certain type of speculators, the latter almost as numerous as the former. A poor man has a better chance on Broadway! The desert is no place for him. A practical miner can earn a fair living, but invariably he squanders it all on the green cloth. The wanderer has an ephemeral existence living upon the bounty of the workman who never refuses him a drink or a stack of white chips--if he is winning. As he seldom wins the wanderer (under this caption I include all those outcasts who form a veritable scum in mining camps) finds little chance to recoup his fortunes at the gambling table. The desert for such as these is a prison difficult to escape from. After the fight Brewer persuaded me to remain as his guest for a few days. He had a pretentious dwelling, as dwellings in Goldfield went, and continued to fill the rôle of host admirably. I was already seized with a spirit of speculation and shortly had become launched with Brewer and an Englishman named Kennedy on a big deal which ended in our securing an option on a prospect known as the Triangle. It was situated about a mile from town at Diamond Fields (why the diamond no one seemed to know!). Everybody was most courteous to me. (I can't imagine why!)