that camp. There were six of us in our cabin—no two from the same State, I think—and a pretty good crowd we were generally. But whisky and gambling will tell in the end, and they did on us. Among the party was one tall, finely-built, athletic man, of some twenty-eight or thirty years of age, who went by the name of "Kanoffsky." The name would indicate a Polish Jew, but he was evidently nothing of the sort, and the name was like that of half the others in camp, merely assumed through caprice or the desire to conceal identity while the possessor was laboring to retrieve a broken fortune or a ruined character. I always thought that he was a collegian, probably a graduate of Harvard or Yale, and he was undoubtedly a New Englander of good family. Curiously enough, his boon companion was a rough, uncouth, uneducated Missourian, who went by the common nickname of "Pike," about the last man in the world one would think to attract the sympathy and secure the confidence of an educated gentleman, such as "Kanoffsky" evidently was. But misfortune and mining excitements make strange bed-fellows. Their intimacy was casually remarked upon by everybody in camp, but in those days we thought little of any social phenomena—we had little time or inclination to think long and seriously about anything—and for a long time nothing important seemed to come of it. But at last an event occurred which startled and excited the whole camp. One dark, stormy Sunday night in the mid-winter season, when the wind roared through the forest in broken, savage blasts, and the
