Ralph Granger and Eri Buddenbock ran a butcher shop at Wagon Wheel Gap. “The” Renninger, of Patiro, a prospector with no tools or provisions, asked them to grub-stake him, as it is called when a man of capital furnishes a man of adventure with bacon, flour, a pick, and three or four donkeys, and starts him off prospecting, with the understanding that he is to have one-tenth of what he finds. Renninger asked Jule Haas to join him, and they departed together. One day the three burros disappeared, and wandered off many miles, with Renninger in hot and profane pursuit until they reached Bachelor Mountain, where he overtook them. But they liked Bachelor Mountain, and Renninger, failing to dislodge them with either rocks or kicks, seated himself to await their pleasure, and began to chip casually at the nearest rock. He struck a vein showing mineral in such rich quantities that he asked Creede to come up and look at it. Creede looked at it, and begged Renninger to define his claim at once. Renninger, offering up thanks to the three donkeys, did so, and named it the “Last Chance.” Then Creede located next to this property, shoulder to shoulder, and named his claim the “Amethyst.” These names are merely names to you; they mean nothing; in Colorado you speak them in a whisper, and they sound like the Standard Oil Company or the Koh-i-noor diamond. Haas was bought off for ten thousand dollars. He went to Germany to patronize the people in the little German village from which he came with his great wealth; four months later Renninger, and Buddenbock, who had staked him, sold their thirds for seventy thousand dollars each; a few days later Granger was offered one hundred thousand dollars for his third, and said he thought he would hold on to it. When I was there, the Chance was putting out one hundred and eighty thousand dollars per month. This shows that Granger was wiser in his generation than Haas. At the time I visited Creede it was quite impossible to secure a bed in any of the hotels or lodging-houses. The Pullman cars were the only available sleeping-places, and rented out their berths for the night they laid over at the mining camp. But even in these, sleeping was precarious, as one gentleman found the night after my arrival. He was mistaken for another man who had picked up a bag of gold-dust from a faro table at Little Delmonico’s, and who had fled into the night. After shooting away the pine-board façade in the Mint gambling-house in which he was supposed to have sought shelter, several citizens followed him on to the sleeping-car, and, of course, pulled the wrong man out of his berth, and stood him up in the aisle in front of four revolvers, while the porter and the other wrong men shivered under their blankets, and begged them from behind the closed curtains to take him outside before they began shooting. The camp was divided in its opinion on the following morning as to whether the joke was on the passenger or on the hasty citizens.