Gold!

I

I LOOK all right — thirty years old, medium build, with a frank,open countenance. Those with whom I carry on an ordinary conversation apparently accept me as normal. It is only when I start talking about gold that things happen. Things happen even within my family circle — in fact, especially within my family circle. No matter how solemnly I state that I have found some gold, that after two and one-half years of searching I learned where some of the stuff lives, my people smile at me and murmur softly, ‘That’s fine; we hope it’s so.’ Their complete incomprehension of my excitement is a dismaying thing.

So I find it best to keep silent. But I am going back as soon as I recover from a digestive disturbance brought on by a prolonged overemphasis on beans and flapjacks. To quit gold mining now is impossible. The virus has me. It is a game, the most strangely fascinating game I have ever played.

It has been an adventure only the more exciting in that the depressiondriven amateur miner found the dice loaded against him. Consider first the story of my partners who preceded me to the gold fields by three months and bore the brunt of the initiation.

In March 1933, Joe and Eric Johnson roomed together in a small California town. They were cousins, about twentyfive years of age, full-blooded Swedes of magnificent physical strength. Leaving crowded homes on Kansas farms, they had sought work farther west.

For a year they had managed to keep going on chance jobs. In March they reached the end of their rope. Strangers in the town, they knew only a handful of people, acquaintances picked up in restaurants or on some job, men in the same straits as themselves. The only organizations they could have appealed to were various local charities, and these were frantically overcrowded. As a matter of fact, it never occurred to Joe and Eric to ask help from anyone.

The two held counsel to determine what they should do. It was clear enough that they must start traveling, or starve, but where should they go? The sensible thing, of course, was to hitch-hike back to their people in Kansas and work out their keep on the farm. They decided against it. Why increase the old folks’ burden? And also, that was not the way to return home. Some day they would go back, but in a good car, dressed in decent clothes, and with money in their pockets. If they had to beg, let it be from strangers.

‘Well,’ said Joe, the younger of the two, ‘is it the highway or the railroad? The railroad’s faster, but if we ain’t going anywhere, the highway’s just as good.’

‘Yeah,’ said Eric, ‘but we can always do that. There’s one chance left—gold.’ In restaurants, poolrooms, and on street corners men were passing on reports from the northern gold country: — ‘Men and women are packin’ gravel fifty yards, ten hours a day, for two bits to forty cents a day. If it was n’t for a deer now and then, they’d starve.’

‘The cream’s all gone. You can’t make it.’

‘They say gold is goin’ up, maybe as high as thirty dollars.’

‘Well, this guy found a little bar in a canyon up on the Feather River, right near the highway. He had them lower him on a rope a hundred feet down into it. Just a hunch, but he panned out eighty dollars the first day. It’s there, but you have to look for it. I’m tellin’ you, the old boys could n’t have got it all; it ain’t reasonable.’

Eric owned a venerable touring car. They had a few pots and pans, a meagre carpentering and digging equipment, four blankets of a sort, a full tank of gasoline, and five dollars borrowed from a friend. The tank of gasoline was calculated to get them to the gold country; the five dollars would have to feed them until they found some gold. Eric had spent two weeks on a prospecting trip the preceding summer, which had been unsuccessful. That was the extent of their experience.

Someone had told them of a mild boom in a remote region of Northern California. The tank of fuel took them to the end of the road at a tiny village. Setting out up the deep, black gorge of the river, they worked their way from bar to bar, and took out ten cents’ worth of dust a day in erratic, unskilled, but desperate panning.

The late rains of winter caught them with no tent and no rain clothing. Soaked to the skin all day, every day, they fought off the cold by keeping constantly on the move. Each night they sought out some cave in the canyon walls, dried out before a roaring fire, and cooked their meals.

Far up the river a rancher gave them the use of a cabin. At the end of two weeks their resources totaled a dollar and a half in gold, a few pounds of flour, and a little oatmeal.

Eric, as the leader of the expedition, decided that the time had come to try another river. In one day’s forced march over the pack trail that followed the rim of the canyon high above, they covered the eighteen miles back to their car.

The few grains of gold bought enough gasoline to carry them to a large river flowing through a deep canyon, a river that has been gouged and torn from end to end, its gravels washed and rewashed as waves of miners invaded it in the fifties, sixties, seventies, and again in the nineties. After the depression miners of the nineties had taken a last skimming from the already very thin milk, claims were abandoned, and in 1933, aside from scattered homesteaders, employees of the Forest Service, and an occasional sniper patiently turning over the gravels in the old bars, the river was deserted.

Now Joe and Eric got down to business. They talked with the snipers, copied their equipment, and asked questions. They discovered that what appeared to be hit-or-miss guesswork was in reality an operation involving exact calculation, great skill in the use of tools, and a long acquaintance with the habits of gold and the action of river currents.

Joe and Eric can shovel. They moved tons of gravel, working twelve hours a day, going to bed at dusk because they had no money for kerosene. Forty cents a day was their earnings — enough for food, not enough for a new pair of shoes.

One day they happened upon a spot where years before someone had dug a few feet into an overhanging bank. A pan of gravel out of the hole gave a good prospect. ‘Now why,’ they wondered, ‘did this fellow stop digging?’ A closer examination revealed the answer. Further excavation could very easily bring the overhang down on them.

But by this time they had learned that the collapse of a wall of tight gravel, provided the clay content is not too high, is always preceded by a tiny trickle of sand issuing from the opening cracks. Two men using the utmost care might be able to gouge a little deeper.

For two hours one man picked gently at the pay streak while the other kept his eye on the overhang. When they dared go no farther, the small pile of pay dirt was quickly run through the dip box, and they set out for the trading store. The heap of dust weighed out $2.17; for that they had risked their lives. But that night they had scrambled eggs for supper. The régime of rice and oatmeal was over.

That was the turning point. They began to calculate formations more closely, and traced out the old miners’ workings. By the middle of July they were taking out six dollars a week. Eric wrote to Carl, the unemployed carpenter who had lent them the five dollars, inviting him to join them. Carl showed me the letter. I was out of a job; anything seemed better than that gnawing idleness.

We told each other that we were going for the prospective fifty cents a day. What we were really seeking, of course, was action, adventure, gold. . . .

II

We found our friends where the river, thick and sullen, and stained a dirty cocoa-brown by the silt from the mines far above, flows through a great forested canyon. In this canyon, a hundred feet from the river’s edge, our two partners were running an open cut into a deep gravel bank. We discovered Joe seated on the edge of the cut beside a wheelbarrow. He was dressed in dilapidated shoes without socks, ancient corduroy trousers patched with canvas, a tiny felt ’dinky’ cap he had filched from some schoolboy. He sat there, a hundred and seventy-five pounds of Kansas brawn, tanned from the belt upward a dull copper-brown, and grinned at us. Eric, he explained, was working out their cabin rent over at the owner’s ranch.

We looked over the diggings. The pay dirt was wheeled out over the edge of the river on a wooden trestle, dumped on to a platform, and shoveled through a coarse wire screen into the hopper of the sluice box. One man stood in the shallow water beside the box and poured dippers of water over the screened gravel as it ran out of the hopper into the sluice box. The gold settled at once to the bottom and was caught in burlap sacking held down by a heavy wire screen which served also as riffles.

That first day, Carl and I stood near the sluice box and watched in silence. I saw stretching ahead of us hard labor and long hours under that glowering July sun. It was to be a kind of slavery, no less arduous because there would be no master except the wolf-at-the-door.

The man at the box finished the day’s run of gravel and began to clean up. We drew near to watch the bottom of the box as the water washed away the sand. Then we saw it — tiny flakes, pale yellow or red with rust — gold, unmistakable.

The burlap sacking was washed in a gold pan and the contents panned down until nothing but gold and black sand remained. After a thorough drying on the stove, this mixture was placed in a copper pan and the black sand, principally oxides of iron, removed with a magnet and by blowing with the breath. The very fine particles of gold remaining in the sand were recovered with mercury.

The tiny mound of dust that represented the day’s run was poured into the pill bottle and duly measured.

‘About two dollars to-day,’ said Joe.

So that was two dollars. We stared at it. We forgot dollars. From that glass vial the Goddess smiled at us. Clean gold has an unreasonable beauty — a soft pervasive glow. I have watched a professional gold buyer weigh out gold for the ten-thousandth time, and heard him remark as he poured it on the scales, ‘That’s pretty gold you got there.’ The finder of a nugget, be it a tiny four-bit piece or a ten-dollar slug, invariably carries it around in his wallet so that he can show it to everyone and have an opportunity to gloat over it whenever he opens the wallet.

‘How many wheelbarrows in that?’ we asked.

‘Twenty. That’s the day’s run.’

‘Then the four of us will have to run forty, two at the box and two getting out gravel. No, forty-five; we ought to gain something in efficiency.’

The next day we ran fifty-five loads and broke the wheelbarrow. But did we get the theoretical five dollars and fifty cents? We did not; our reward was three-fifty and a two-hour shutdown while the wheelbarrow was rebuilt.

When finished, the little push-wagon was an architectural perplexity, but it ran and was strong enough to carry twohundred-pound boulders. The frame and handles were of rough-hewn oak cut from the woods, the wheel was a loan from our rancher-landlord, the rest was driftwood lumber reenforced with strips cut from tin cans. Give a Kansas farmer a hammer and a length of w’ire and he can repair a grand piano.

Daily our little hole in the bank grew deeper. The early hydraulic miners had left this bit of ground because a high rim of bedrock made drainage expensive. If we could go deep enough, and if the rim proved to be just where it ought to be, and if the rim should have a little fold or ‘catch’ in it just there, some nice gold was waiting for us.

Unexpectedly, we struck water. The ancient channel we were working in was deeper than we had calculated. We were helpless without machinery.

From the storekeeper we borrowed a tiny gasoline engine and an ancient pump. The two Kansans labored over this decrepit outfit for half a day, practically rebuilt it, and set it up. After two hours of terrific exertion, the little motor had the water lowered two feet. Frantically we shoveled out the gravel; there were four dollars in a half yard of pay dirt. We were getting into it.

And now the panting little engine expired. The lift was too great for it. We took the outfit back to the owner and sat in the store gloomily.

In that country anything for sale is posted in the grapevine newspaper, and the information conveyed for miles along the river. It is always strictly reliable. Ten miles down river, the storekeeper told us, a suitable pump outfit could be had for thirty-five dollars.

We had ten dollars. To be sure, we knew we were into dirt that could pay off the balance in a week; but there is no one more skeptical of a miner’s optimism than another miner. A miner thinks nothing of putting in a whole day helping a friend; he will lend tools, time, and money, but when he is selling out his outfit he demands cash.

It is often a year before a new miner has saved enough to buy an engine, if indeed he ever does. Almost always he comes to the gold fields at the very end of his resources.

In the end, wre applied to our people at home for a loan. Within a week we had the money order, and the pump. Down into that channel we fought our way, foot by foot. Huge boulders had to be pried loose, shattered with a sledge, and removed; the suction pipe had to be manoeuvred constantly as the water was lowered. It was the hardest kind of labor, but a yard of that hard-won gravel turned the box yellow with gold in half a day. In five days we took out fifty dollars. The last day we cleaned up a full ounce — all ‘scale-gold’ small flakes about the size and color of cigarette tobacco. We added bacon and canned goods to our larder. Joe sent to a mailorder house for a pair of shoes.

We had struck squarely upon the rim we were seeking. Unfortunately our pit was so deep that the walls were endangered by seepage. The night after we abandoned the hole, one wall crumbled, burying what was left of the pay dirt under tons of worthless material. Down there somewhere was the bedrock with some sweet gold in the crevices, but we should never see it.

Our company went into executive session. Said Eric, ‘There’s a claim down river that we can lease for running a drift [tunnel]. We’ve got the pump; Joe and I used to blast stumps on the farm; the rest is ordinary hammer and saw. There’s nothing to it.’ It was so ordered.

We set up our camp on a sandy, shaded bench by the river, and began work on the drift. The truth was, the thrill of the game we were playing was taking hold of us. We were working in the open, in a mountain region of complete and enveloping loveliness; there was no boss standing over us. We were free.

But it was the freedom of the castaway on his desert island. It was work or go hungry; every resource of equipment and knowledge must be used. As we got under way, problems of construction completely absorbed the three carpenters. They would growl and argue over chalk lines and timbering sets, but as a matter of fact they were having the time of their lives. We had got hold of an iron dumpcart from an abandoned coal mine, but there were no rails for it. We hewed out rails from native fir with a broadaxe, and built an inclined trestle from the drift out over the riverbank. The mine timbers came from far up the slope on the opposite side of the river. We studied old drifts for details of timbering. That part was easy. It was the actual excavation that was agonizingly slow. We were in heavy ground, boulders of all sizes wedged so tightly together that it required hours of prying with the bar and pounding with the sledge to gain two or three feet. The strength of the two Swedish farmers was always a source of wonder to me. Carl and I are of ordinary physique with a capacity for an average day’s work. Our partners inherited a build that extends from the ground up, solid and symmetrical as an oak. Joe was a champion basketball player; Eric is a 155-pound Sandow. With them it was ‘Can do,’ and the boulders moved.

Most difficult was the hard-rock drilling. We encountered a few boulders so big that we had to blast our way through them. We were days getting through five feet of rock. The fault lay in our drills; we could sharpen them reasonably well, but we could never get the temper just right. I am not going to forget the night Joe and I banged away from eight till two drilling one eighteen-inch hole in a tough black boulder.

Fifty, sixty feet we pushed that drift. The last three weeks we worked day and night in a race with our grocery credit. It was a good mine. The timbering was neat and sturdy; the railroad was a thing of beauty. We were proud of that mine. We are still proud of it.

But there was no gold connected with it. The rim was somewhere else. Our grubstake was gone, we were in debt at the store. The November rains had started; there would be snow soon. We needed winter clothes, blankets, and a cabin. A prolonged diet consisting mostly of flapjacks, rice, beans, and potatoes had resulted in a decline of physical strength and a sullen discouragement.

There was only one thing to do. We went to the man who had given us the lease and told him we were pulling our equipment out the next day. Without a change of expression he said, ‘Sure; put your stuff on the barge and drop down to my claim across the river. There’s a man and his wife there now makin’ a dollar a day dippin’ by hand. You ought to take out five dollars with your pump. I’ll show you where to start; I’ve prospected all over that bar.’ We had won friends; this man was the best prospector on the river.

The next evening we had five dollars in the treasury. In addition we bagged a fat young goose that had strayed from some flock in the fog of the night before. It seemed like manna from Heaven — it was the first and last goose I ever saw on that river.

The situation called for a celebration. The goose was roasted in the Dutch oven with all the trimmings. (There were no credit complications now.) Dinner was served by lamplight under our canvas awning. Jason, the owner of the claim, was guest of honor and also chief cook.

Extending diagonally across the bar was a pay streak about fifty feet wide and a hundred feet long, with an average depth of four feet. We shoveled a swath back and forth across it, each day pouring tons of gravel through the sluice box. In our race against time, we had to develop efficiency. Within a week we had the outfit functioning like a factory, every man working at top speed, the pay dirt moving in a steady stream from gravel pit to screen, to sluice box, to tailing pile. Every night there was a third of an ounce of gold in the box.

And the same strangely working economic forces that had exiled us into the mountains now in a turn of the wheel tossed money into our laps. Gold went up! From the original $17 (our price), it moved to $20, to $26, and became eventually pegged at $29.

We moved into a cabin; there were new boots, flannel shirts, and bright new shovels. The future seemed secure; we could hunt deer and quail and rabbits and let the snows come. The long hours of labor in the open had engendered a certain dull tranquillity that was like contentment.

It was too good to last. In three weeks our ravenous four-man machine had devoured our entire pay streak. The other occupants of the bar, an old man and his wife who were laboriously working a hand outfit, offered to share with us the little pay area they had found. We declined the offer, with thanks. Said Eric, as we moved on to prospect for a new place to work, ‘No wonder that old man’s broke; I’ll bet he’s been giving things away all his life.’

III

Like all the new snipers, we were poor prospectors. Prospecting is a business not to be learned in a season or two. A two-foot excavation here, a pan or two out of an old hole there, and our patience was exhausted. The four of us traveled dejectedly up and down that little bar, and at the end of a half day set out for new territory up the river. I was afterwards to learn that there was a vast amount of untouched pay dirt on that bar, lying snugly in the deep strata next to bedrock and all along the bank in the virgin ground just above high-water line.

We did not ask Jason to show us another pay streak. Our search had satisfied us that there was no gold left. In three weeks we had taken out $175. We were prosperous miners now; we could do our own prospecting.

Each man with an independent outfit, — pick, shovel, and pan, — we worked slowly up the canyon. We dug so many holes that someone was bound to strike something. There came a sudden cold snap; the river dropped to an abnormal low, exposing ground usually covered by six inches of water. Eric chanced upon a pay streak that proved to be a hundred feet long, eighteen feet wide, and one foot deep. We took care of it in one week, and were thirty dollars richer.

We got by. There was plenty of food in the cabin as the snows came. One evening in January a neighbor dropped in to see us, one of the foremen of the near-by CCC camp.

‘I’ve got a few vacancies,’ he said. ‘I watched you fellows at work on that drift when I went swimming with the boys last summer. Nice timber work. Our boys are husky and willing enough, but this last bunch are all from the city. If we start ’em out in the morning with sharp axes, by noon they’ve hit so many rocks the axe is a sledgehammer. We need local men. You can get in as local experienced woodsmen, $30 a month, paid directly to you. An assistant leader gets $36; a leader, $45.’

Joe and Eric joined the camp. Eric is now leader of an axe gang; Joe has charge of the camp’s wood supply.

Carl and I could not give up our freedom. To work when we pleased and go where we pleased, when we pleased, was too comfortable, and mining was too interesting.

We had a nice setup in a large deposit of gravel, low-grade but consistent. The cleanup on Saturday always paid the grocery bill, with usually enough extra to take us to the dance thirty miles down river.

In April, Carl went home to look after the rental of a house he owns. Building had picked up; his former boss had a place for him.

I worked alone, boring into the riverbank in search of richer spots where the old channels crossed. Spring on the river is a brief, intense quiet, when the rains are suddenly over and the sun has not yet burned the life out of all that green glory.

One day as I was prospecting about, the point of my shovel dug into a stratum of strangely colored gravel — blue as indigo and heavy as iron sand. Now along the river there is a legend about blue gravel. The old storekeepers will give a miner credit ‘ if the bedrock’s a-pitchin’ and the gravel’s turnin’ blue.’

As I started to wash a pan of that gravel, I was shaking so that I could scarcely hold the pan. The stuff was hard to wash, too, heavy and sluggish. It was blank. In the next few hours I tried a dozen more samples; I followed the blue gravel down through three feet of water to bedrock. There was not a color in a yard of it.

I sought the opinion of my friend Jason. He studied the formation and gave his judgment: —

‘When you hit it in blue gravel, you got somethin Wait for low water, then follow the bedrock in; if it’s there it’s goin’ to be heavy gold and all in a heap at the bottom of the deposit. You may have nothin’ or a thousand bucks within fifteen feet of you.’

Carefully, so that no trace of telltale blue stain could catch the eye of a wandering prospector, I filled in the test hole, and raked the top gravel over it.

The next day I left for a month’s work with an electric power company far back in the hills.

When I returned I found my equipment placed in a neat pile just outside the claim. Next morning a man visited my camp. He introduced himself as the owner of the claim.

I said, ‘O. K. We filed on the claim because we were told that you had left the country two years ago and we thought you had abandoned it. You had until the first of July to do your assessment work. You got here in time, so that’s that. Would you consider selling all or a part of your claim?’

‘No.’

‘How about leasing?’

‘No.’

After a while I wandered down to the diggings to look things over. From end to end the exposed formation had been gouged and sampled, but my blue gravel had escaped detection. I say ‘my blue gravel.’ The claim belonged to someone else, but I considered the discovery my own possession. The angle that worried me was the uncertainty. Was the gold there? I could buy that claim, somehow. With what? Risk other people’s money in a wildcat gamble? I decided to forget it.

Jason was building a cabin. He has been, at various times in his forty-odd years, carpenter, auto mechanic, machinist, farmer, sailor, oil worker, and a few other things he has mentioned and I’ve forgotten. For the last eight years he has been intermittently a gold miner. He has a nose for gold, an intuition that is uncanny.

I said, ‘I have an outfit and no ground. You’ve got claims and no motor. Suppose we go into partnership?’

Jason drove a dozen more nails. ‘Yeah, I reckon,’ he said. ‘I’ll be through here in two weeks. Move your stuff and start diggin’ holes. Go over on that bar where you fellers quit and sink a hole every fifty feet. Pan every foot as you go down and don’t stop for nothin’ but water or bedrock. It’s some gold there somewhere. Look for a yellow mud streak; if the mud colors up the water while you’re pannin’, it’s a good sign. Gold’s got to have something to hold it, see? Pieces of iron and old square nails run with gold in second wash. Little rocks shaped like hot cakes and cookies follow a pay streak. Main thing is to get those holes deep.’

I dug holes. A pick is used for the first foot, then a digging bar. We used Model T drive shafts, sharpened to a curved chisel prying edge on one end and a straight point on the other.

The first week I got nothing but exercise. The second week I found a mud streak. In the first pan from it there were two bright little nuggets, worth about two cents each. With our outfit, that was wages gravel.

After working off the top to water level, we put the pump in the hole and went down to bedrock. It was good pay, but all second wash. The old boys had been there.

Jason was not satisfied. He scraped around on the bedrock nearest the river and brought up a small quantity of greenish-blue gravel. It was heavy and stuck to the point of his shovel like a lump of clay.

‘Virgin ground,’ said Jason. ‘They drained this hole with the Chinese paddle-wheel pump and must a been shovelin’ out of water or they would n’t have left any gravel on the bottom. This is as deep as they went; we can handle more water than they could. I got an idea.’

He stood on the level sand next to our hole and studied the curve of the river and the slope of the gravel on the bar. Then with the point of a pick he marked out a rectangle in the sand, starting at the edge of the hole and extending down river some fifty feet. ‘There’s the coarse gold streak,’ he said. ‘If bedrock ain’t deeper than it is here, we’ll get second-wash scrapin’s. If it’s deeper, we’ll get virgin ground. We’ll take and dump the overburden in the river, makin’ a levee with our tailin’s, and work out into the river.’

For several days we wheeled out the worthless top gravel, clearing our area down to water level. When all was ready, Jason drove a bar down through the gravel on the floor of our excavation. At two feet he struck something solid. He screwed out the bar with a three-foot Stillson and examined the point. It held traces of a blue shale-like substance.

‘Bedrock,’ he announced. ‘We taken all this trouble for nothin’.’

We sat on the edge of the hole and looked at our week’s work.

‘Well,’ said Jason, ‘we got this hole stripped; just as well take it down to bedrock. There’ll be a little color on it.’

From the first hole we followed the bedrock across the new excavation. There were twenty feet of fair second-wash scrapings. Abruptly, the bedrock dipped straight down. The gravel changed to a compact, sticky blue-black.

Jason stared at it a moment and spoke softly: —

‘That was n’t bedrock I fetched up on the bar. It was virgin ground. Thishere’s a pothole.’

IV

In the next month we took out five hundred dollars, pushing back the river with our levee until we were working far from the original bank and eight feet below the surface of the river. We bought a larger pump to take care of the water. At the farthest point reached we struck a layer of bright yellow clay just above the blue gravel, the concentrated wash from years of hydraulic mining above. It was rich in large nuggets, lost in the careless sixties and seventies.

It became evident that this section of the river had been too deep to wingdam and that the entire main channel was untouched. We stared into the depths of the river, now crystal-clear, and became oppressed by visions of the gold-laden crevices and masses of rich concentrates that lay so near. No wonder my people notice a peculiar gleam in my eye when I talk about gold.

It was growing late in the season. One good rain in the headwaters and our fragile levee would give way. As the rains began, we kept the pump going day and night, and put in a twenty-fourhour crew.

When the river fell after the first storm we gambled on another try, and again the river ran us out.

In November there was enough water to open the hydraulic season. Jason had a pipe and Giant on lease. After months with pick and shovel, it was a joy to stand beside the huge iron gun, swing the perfectly balanced barrel with a touch of the hand, send tons of water crashing into a gravel bank, and watch it churn the gravel into a red froth, then kick the boiling muck along the race and into the mouth of the sluice.

With those yards and yards of gravel roaring through the box, I looked for a rich deposit of values behind each wooden riffle. Jason grinned at me strangely and at the end of the day’s run obligingly panned the contents of the first riffle. About ten cents!

‘This is a tough game,’ he said. ‘The old-timers worked out all the pay they could find, and remember they had seventy years to hunt for it. Our only chance is to prospect with the Giant, cut into these chunks of gravel they left, and hope we strike somethin’.’

Again and again we moved our huge outfit, each time knocking down three hundred feet of pipe, packing the heavy joints hundreds of yards through rain and mud, and hammering them together again on some distant hillside. When we did strike a few days’ pay, we spent the money hiring men to help us move the outfit to another prospect.

The winter dragged along. In March we had the worst luck of the season — two woeks of boring into an enormous bank of gravel, and two dollars and eighty cents to show for it.

One noon I had quit early and gone to the cabin to cook dinner. Jason came in half an hour later. He stood in the doorway a moment, and looked at me, saying nothing. Then he drew a folded wad of paper from his watch pocket and tossed it on the table.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I hit it. That’s four pans out of the pay streak. There’s a good two bucks there.’

It was coarse, rusty gold. I said, ‘ We were bound to hit it sometime, moving all that dirt.’

Jason laughed. ‘That’s the funny part of it. I did n’t run into it with the Giant. This gravel was in plain sight all the time. The guys who worked that back channel had to cut a race through the front channel to get dump. This pay streak is in the front channel and only ten feet wide; they plumb overlooked it. I happened to look up at the bank while I was watchin’ the sluice, and saw a clay streak that looked interestin’, and there she was.’

All we had to do was to extend our pipe line a hundred feet and reset the Giant for a direct assault on the pay streak. A hundred feet! We had long since pressed into service every ancient, rusty joint that we could hammer into shape. In desperation we spent two precious days searching miles along the river for a few sections of pipe, or just fifty feet, or ‘Please, mister, lend us two joints for one month?’ The hydraulic boom was on, everything was tied up.

Very well, if we wore unable to go around that mountain of gravel, we would cut a path through it and shorten our pipe line. A solid week we hammered at the hillside cutting a way through. We were ready to relay the pipe. Jason glanced up at the towering bank that loomed above us. Across the face of it was a huge perpendicular crack.

It looked safe enough to me. That bank was as dry and hard as an adobe wall. But Jason swung the Giant about and directed the stream squarely into the centre of the wall. ‘We got to get a cave,’ he explained, ‘and bring that overhang down. It might stay up there fifty years or ten minutes. Plenty of men been killed workin’ in too close. Never trust a clay bank.’

One of us worked on the cave while the other stood at a distance and scanned the bank for the tiny trickle of gravel that would indicate a widening of the crack in the wall.

In three days we had a hole in the bank large enough to hold a couple of freight cars, and still the overhang held.

We looked at the snow cap on the ridge above us. It was fast disappearing. When the last of the snow vanished, our water would shut off like a faucet.

Jason called for the sledgehammer, digging bar, and all the dynamite we had. We ascended the cliff from the rear and planted the powder ten feet from the brow of the cliff. The fuse lit, we took up grandstand seats on a distant hillside.

The charge exploded with a satisfying subterranean tremor, but the bank held.

‘It’s workin’ inside,’ said Jason. ‘Tomorrow about this time she’ll fall.’

The next day the bank gave way, burying the pay streak and the entire race in an avalanche of trees, boulders, and gravel. The Giant itself was partially engulfed. We dug it out and trained it on the mountain of débris that lay across the race. The trees had to be cut up and thrown aside, the large boulders broken into eight-inch fragments that would go through the box.

In three days, working long hours, we had the race cleaned and the Giant reset as close to the pay streak as the pipe would reach. It was going to be a matter of a few feet, win or lose. While Jason wedged the base of the Giant snugly in place and reduced to the three-inch nozzle to give us greater range, I went over the mile and a half of ditch and flume, stopping small leaks to get another fraction of an inch of water. When I had finished I opened the head gate above the pipe line and came down ahead of the water.

We stood beside the Giant as the water roared down the pipe, the leaky old joints hissing as the water backed up and increased the pressure. The column of water beat along the race, gradually lifting toward the pay streak. Then it was into it, with a force that sent the brown muck dancing along the bedrock and into the mouth of the sluice. We were going to get a few yards of pay dirt through anyhow. I hurried down to the mouth of the sluice, grabbed the sluice hook, and the mine went into production.

When we turned the Giant to one side after three hours’ run, the riffles were rich with gold and here and there on the clean-swept bedrock lay the heavier nuggets, burnished to a gleaming yellow by the whirl of sand and water.

Three days of frenzied piping, and on the fourth day the water dropped off, chopping ten feet off our range. It might as well have been ten miles; for us the season was over. With the last of the water, Jason piped clay from the bank above down over the pay streak, completely hiding it.

When we cleaned up we had a nice bottle of heavy gold, enough to grubstake us for several months. I turned the bottle in my fingers, fascinated by the compact, gleaming mass. ‘Jason,’ I said, ‘I’m going nuts. Why didn’t we find that streak two months ago? Why didn’t we have fifty feet more pipe?'

‘Take it easy,’ said Jason. ‘You can’t mine gold without you’re a little bit crazy; or if you ain’t, you will be. Forget it. That gold can’t walk away; we’ll get it next year. In the meantime, we got work to do. First, we file on this ground; it’s been open for fifty years. Then we see what’s here; maybe in six months we’ll have a few acres prospected.’

Well, we’re in partnership, the water will soon be roaring down hundreds of feet of new pipe, and we’ll be off to a new season. Everyone has a right to be crazy about one thing. For mine, I’ll take gold mining.