A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready

Alvin Mulrady grows potatoes and garden truck on a hillside above the California mining camp of Rough-and-Ready, and the prospectors below him think farming beneath contempt. Sinking a well to irrigate the patch, he strikes the gold vein that every one of them had walked over, and wakes up a millionaire — with a wife and daughter suddenly in Europe, a son with a fast trotter, and a large new house he sits alone in. The secretary he takes on out of pity is an old paralytic named Slinn, half the county's proof that hunting a blind lead drives a man mad: years before, on that same hill, Slinn struck gold in his tunnel and was felled by a stroke the same afternoon, before he could tell a living soul where it was.

Bret Harte published the novella in 1887, bound with Devil's Ford, nearly twenty years after "The Luck of Roaring Camp" made his name and long after he had left California for good. It turns the strike-it-rich story he invented back on itself: the strike is over almost before the book begins, and what follows is an account of what a windfall costs the man it falls on, and the man who did the digging.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text in its prologue and six chapters.