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voraciously reading whatever he could get his hands on, devouring dime novels and Shakespeare with equal zeal. He also liked to write poetry; it was his habit to wander off into the hills and then return with an earnest, if rather sentimental ode to the beauty and majesty of the rugged northern California countryside. And somewhere along the way he’d learned to play the piano. But once he moved in with his sister, his formal education came to an end.
    Protective of her brother and proud of his talents, Rose tried to convince her husband that the boy should be allowed to continue his schooling. Her hope was that one day George would become a Baptist minister. To Watson’s way of thinking, however, school was just an idler’s pastime. Days were meant to be spent earning one’s keep, and now that he had turned eleven it was high time George started earning his. He put the boy to work tending his flock of sheep.
    It was a lonely occupation, a life where George needed to depend on his thoughts for company if he were to pass the time without giving in to despair. What did he think about day after solitary day? The secrets that jump through a young boy’s active mind are forever stored in another sort of treasure room. However, there is a clue to at least one wishful daydream.
    On George’s twelfth birthday, Watson allowed the boy to celebrate by holding a handful of gold nuggets; Watson had received them as payment for a freight shipment he had delivered in his wagon to a mine in the Sierra Nevada. Excited, his eyes shining, George cradled the pieces of gold. In their heft he felt the promise of a larger fortune. “When I grow up,” he vowed as though making a birthday wish, “I’m going to be a gold miner.”
    Birthday or not, Watson had no mind to indulge any foolishness. “Well, son,” he said, quickly reminding George of the boy’s outstanding debt to him, “you’ll do exactly as I tell you until you’re twenty-one. After that you can do as you please.”
    George obeyed. He measured out nearly a decade in dutiful service to the burly, self-confident man who had taken him in as a homeless child. When Watson arranged for neighboring ranches to hire the boy as a sheepherder for $15 a month, George did his work with a convict’s forlorn resignation. He grew to hate sheep. He loathed the foul smell, the incessant bleating, the constant shitting. He forced himself to find the reserves of character that would allow him to survive this particular hell. He was already living in the future, an imagined time and place where he’d be his own man, on his own journey, in pursuit of his own fortune. His father’s son.
    A month after his twenty-first birthday, his debt finally paid in full, George made his long-anticipated move. His immediate concern was to find a way to earn the grubstake that would allow him to support himself while he lived the prospector’s uncertain life. He decided on what was, under the narrow circumstances, he told himself, a reasonable plan. George went to the nearby naval base on Mare Island, a skinny strip of land across from the northern California city of Vallejo, and announced that he wanted to join the marines.
    The medical exam proved to be nothing more than a quick formality. The blanks on his chart were duly filled: Height: 5′9″. Weight: 160 pounds. Eyes: blue. Hair: brown. Complexion: light. The two months of training that followed were rigorous, but George, who had spent an active outdoor life, handled the challenges with skill and little complaint. Marine discipline, however, chaffed. For someone who had been on his own, who had fixed the meandering course of his shepherd’s days largely according to his whims, the constant barking orders and enforced schedule were a torture. Military life went completely against his grain. He gave serious consideration to sneaking out of the barracks late one night as his fellow marines slept their exhausted sleep. He’d get off the island and