The winter of ’71-’72 was a feverish one for San Francisco. The rising excitement in Virginia ran like a tidal wave over the mountains to the city by the sea and there broke in a seething whirl. There was no stock market in the Nevada camp. Pine Street was the scene of the operations of capitalist and speculator--the arena where bull and bear met. In Virginia men fought against the forces of nature. They matched their strength with the elements of the primeval world. Water and fire were their enemies. Their task was the tearing out from the rock-ribbed flanks of the mountains the treasure that nature had buried with jealous care. They performed prodigies of energy, conquered the unconquerable, rose to the height of their mighty antagonist, giant against giant. In San Francisco men fought with one another. The treasure once in their hands, the battle lost its dignity and became the ignominious scramble of the swindler and the swindled. The gold and silver--thrown among the crowd--ran this way and that, like spilled quicksilver. Most of it ran the way its manipulators directed, into pockets that were already full, carrying with it the accumulation of gold from other pockets less full, whose owners were less cunning. Through the winter Crown Point and Belcher--the neighboring mine into which the ore-body extended--continued to rise. Confidence had been restored; everybody was investing. Clerks and servant girls drew their savings out of banks and stocking feet and bought shares. In April the stock had reached its highest point, seven hundred and twenty-five dollars. In May, one month later, it dropped to one hundred and seventy-five. It was the greatest and most rapid decline the San Francisco stock market had ever known. The city was for the moment stunned by it. The confidence in Virginia--for three years regarded as “petered”--had returned in full force. The sudden drop knocked the breath from the lungs of those who had been vociferating the recrudescence of the Comstock. A quantity of fortunes, great and small, were swept away in the collapse. The brokers’ cries for “mud” drew the last nickels from the clerks and the servant girls, the last dollars from their employers. When the wave receded the shore was strewn with wrecks. For the second time this wave had slowly risen to level-brimming flood, broken, swept back and left such a drift of human wreckage. Throughout the city there was wailing. Nearly everybody had suffered. The last remnant of the fortune left to Jerry Barclay by his father was gone. His mother too had lost, fortunately not heavily. But she bemoaned her few thousands with as much zeal as her cook did the five hundred, which constituted the savings of years.