Another great passion fills his later days. Since the wandering Comstock and Curry, proverbially unfortunate discoverers, like Marshall, pointed to hundreds of millions for the "silver kings," along Mount Davidson's stony, breast, he gambles daily. The stock board is his play-room. The mining stock exchange gives his maturer years the wilder excitements of the old El Dorado. Washoe, Nevada Territory, or the State of Nevada, the new "Silverado" drives all men crazy. A city shines now along the breast of the Storey County peaks, nine thousand feet above the sea. The dulness of California's evolution is broken by the rush to Washoe. Already the hardy prospectors spread out in that great hunt for treasure which will bring Colorado, Idaho, and Montana, crowned aspirants, bearing gifts of gold and silver, to the gates of the Union. The whole West is a land of hidden treasures. Speculation's mad fever seized on Hardin from the days of 1860. Shares, stocks, operations, schemes, all the wild devices of hazard, fill up his days with exciting successes and damning failures. His name, prestige, and credit, carry him to the front. As in the early days, his cool brain and nerve mark him as a desperate gamester. But his stakes are now gigantic. Secure in his mansion house, with private wires in his study, he operates through many brokers and agents. His interrupted law business is transferred to less prominent Southern advocates. Philip Hardin's fine hand is everywhere. Reliable dependants, old prospecting friends and clients, keep him informed by private cipher of every changing turn of the brilliant Virginia City kaleidoscope. Hardin gambles for pleasure, for vanity, and for excitement. Led on by his desire to stand out from the mass of men, he throws his fortune, mixed with the funds of Lagunitas, into the maelstrom of California Street. Success and defeat alternate. It is a transition time. While war rages in the East, the California merchant kings are doubling fortunes in the cowardly money piracy known as California's secession. The "specific contract act" is the real repudiation of the government's lawful money. This stab in the back is given to the struggling Union by the well-fed freedom shriekers of the Union League. They howl, in public, over their devotion to the interests of the land. The future railroad kings of the Pacific, Stanford, Hopkins, Crocker, Huntington, Colton, and their allies, are grasping the gigantic benefits flowing from the Pacific Railroad, recommended by themselves as a war measure. Heroes. The yet uncrowned bonanza kings are men of obscure employment, or salaried miners working for wages which would not in a month pay their petty cash of a day in a few years. Quiet Jim Flood, easy O'Brien, sly Jones, sturdy Mackay, and that guileless innocent, "Jim Fair," are toiling miners or "business men." Their peculiar talents are hidden by the obscurity of humdrum, honest labor.