Now that, by rights, should end my saga, as one is not supposed to resort to coincidence in stories. But as this is a true yarn, I might as well scour it down and give you the final punch.

Thereafter I settled down to a period of recuperation on a friend’s farm in Maryland, and I suppose I would have been recuperating still had it not been for a sudden yearning to shoot at a target.

I cleaned up a .22 rifle and we went out into the orchard. But it was difficult to secure the target to a tree, and my friend discovered a rusty nail and handed me a rock. I had struck the nail twice when asked what gold ore looked like. I gesticulated with the stone in my hand, and mentioned, in an offhand manner, that gold ore was very similar to the piece of quartz I held in my hand. Then I started to pound the nail once more. But my friend advanced the startling idea that, if gold ore held the same appearance as the rock I held in my hand, why was it that the rock in my hand was not gold ore. I thought that over for a moment and then looked back at the rock.

By blinking my eyes with great rapidity I finally managed to blurt out that it was, without doubt, a piece of gold-bearing quartz.

We went over the surrounding hillside and everywhere we looked, we saw gold ore. Tons and tons of it lying loose on the surface. And then we discovered the outcrops which told the story of a tremendous vein.

Even then we refused to believe it. O. Henry had been dead for years, and such a snap ending was not possible in real life. But nevertheless, there was the wide vein, all within this property, and to place a value on our find, we sent ore to New York for assay.

While we waited for the gold assay to return, I mentioned it casually to one or two of the townsmen of Beallsville, but in a typical Maryland way, they looked at me and then resumed their discussions of corn and farm relief.

The assay finally arrived and ended our suspense by stating that the ore ran $82.47 a ton in gold content with a slight amount of silver.

But here was the supreme joke of our lives. I had walked over this field time after time, seeing nothing, had gone thirteen hundred miles south to find something which had lain two feet under my shoe soles.

And the moral of this story is: Never go gold prospecting in the West Indies, especially when you have a gold mine in your own back yard.

The Sample Pick Saga Continued...
Argosy Article

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