He thought of all the people in that haunted town two thousand feet below, how they’d endured this brutal wilderness and all its impositions—the cold, the thin air, the loneliness, maddening isolation—for just a fraction of what he held in his hand. And in that moment, he no longer regarded the residents of Abandon and the thousand other mining camps scattered like bacteria through the West as people of ambition and courage. They were a cold, dirty, desperate, miserable lot. He saw them now so clearly. They had crossed the plains and made homes in these savage mountains and borne their myriad
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Got a point
