The Gould & Curry claim comprised twelve hundred feet, and it all
belonged originally to the two men whose name it bears. Mr. Curry owned
two-thirds of it—and he said that he sold it out for twenty-five hundred
dollars in cash, and an old plug horse that ate up his market value in
hay and barley in seventeen days by the watch. And he said that Gould
sold out for a pair of second-hand government blankets and a bottle of
whisky that killed nine men in three hours, and that an unoffending
stranger that smelt the cork was disabled for life. Four years afterward
the mine thus disposed of was worth in the San Francisco market seven
million six hundred thousand dollars in gold coin.