North of Fifty-Three Part 25

"That's the stuff," Bill murmured. "Only it seems rather far-fetched for your poet to blame inanimate matter for the cussedness of humanity in general. I suppose, though, he thought he was striking a highly dramatic note. Anyway, it looks as if we'd struck it pretty fair.

It's time, too--the June rise will hit us like a whirlwind one of these days."

"About what is the value of those little pieces?" Hazel asked.

"Oh, fifty or sixty cents," he answered. "Not much by itself. But it seems to be uniform over the bar--and I can wash a good many pans in a day's work."

"I should think so," she remarked. "It didn't take you ten minutes to do that one."

"Whitey Lewis and I took out over two hundred dollars a day on that other creek last spring--no, a year last spring, it was," he observed reminiscently. "This isn't as good, but it's not to be sneezed at, either. I think I'll make me a rocker. I've sampled this bend quite a lot, and I don't think I can do any better than fly at this while the water stays low."

"I can help, can't I?" she said eagerly.

"Sure," he smiled. "You help a lot, little person, just sitting around keeping me company."

"But I want to work," she declared. "I've sat around now till I'm getting the fidgets."

"All right; I'll give you a job," he returned good-naturedly.

"Meantime, let's eat that lunch you packed up here."

In a branch of the creek which flowed down through the basin. Bill had found plentiful colors as soon as the first big run-off of water had fallen. He had followed upstream painstakingly, panning colors always, and now and then a few grains of coa.r.s.e gold to encourage him in the quest. The loss of their horses precluded ranging far afield to that other glacial stream which he had worked with Whitey Lewis when he was a free lance in the North. He was close to his base of supplies, and he had made wages--with always the prospector's lure of a rich strike on the next bar.

And now, with May well advanced, he had found definite indications of good pay dirt. The creek swung in a hairpin curve, and in the neck between the two sides of the loop the gold was sifted through wash gravel and black sand, piled there by G.o.d only knew how many centuries of glacial drift and flood. But it was there. He had taken panfuls at random over the bar, and uniformly it gave up coa.r.s.e gold. With a rocker he stood a fair chance of big money before the June rise.

"In the morning," said he, when lunch was over, "I'll bring along the ax and some nails and a shovel, and get busy."

That night they trudged down to the cabin in high spirits. Bill had washed out enough during the afternoon to make a respectable showing on Hazel's outspread handkerchief. And Hazel was in a gleeful mood over the fact that she had unearthed a big nugget by herself. Beginner's luck, Bill said teasingly, but that did not diminish her elation. The old, adventurous glamour, which the long winter and moods of depression had worn threadbare, began to cast its pleasant spell over her again.

The fascination of the gold hunt gripped her. Not for the stuff itself, but for what it would get. She wondered if the men who dared the impa.s.sive solitudes of the North for weary, lonesome years saw in every morsel of the gold they found a picture of what that gold would buy them in kindlier lands. And some never found any, never won the stake that would justify the gamble. It was a gamble, in a sense--a pure game of chance; but a game that took strength, and nerve, a st.u.r.dy soul, to play.

Still, the gold was there, locked up in divers storing places in the lap of the earth, awaiting those virile enough to find and take. And out beyond, in the crowded places of the earth, were innumerable gateways to comfort and pleasure which could be opened with gold. It remained only to balance the one against the other. Just as she had often planned according to her opportunities when she was a wage slave in the office of Bush and Company, so now did she plan for the future on a broader scale, now that the North promised to open its treasure vault to them--an att.i.tude which Bill Wagstaff encouraged and abetted in his own whimsical fas.h.i.+on. There was nothing too good for them, he sometimes observed, provided it could be got. But there was one profound difference in their respective temperaments, Hazel sometimes reflected. Bill would shrug his wide shoulders, and forget or forego the unattainable, where she would chafe and fume. She was quite positive of this.

But as the days pa.s.sed there seemed no question of their complete success. Bill fabricated his rocker, a primitive, boxlike device with a blanket screen and transverse slats below. It was faster than the pan, even rude as it was, and it caught all but the finer particles of gold. Hazel helped operate the rocker, and took her turn at shoveling or filling the box with water while Bill rocked. Each day's end sent her to her bed healthily tired, but happily conscious that she had helped to accomplish something.

A queer twist of luck put the cap-sheaf on their undertaking. Hazel ran a splinter of wood into her hand, thus putting a stop to her activities with shovel and pail. Until the wound lost its soreness she was forced to sit idle. She could watch Bill ply his rocker while she fought flies on the bank. This grew tiresome, particularly since she had the sense to realize that a man who works with sweat streaming down his face and a mind wholly absorbed in the immediate task has no desire to be bothered with inconsequential chatter. So she rambled along the creek one afternoon, armed with hook and line on a pliant willow in search of sport.

The trout were hungry, and struck fiercely at the bait. She soon had plenty for supper and breakfast. Wherefore she abandoned that diversion, and took to prying tentatively in the lee of certain bowlders on the edge of the creek--prospecting on her own initiative, as it were. She had no pan, and only one hand to work with, but she knew gold when she saw it--and, after all, it was but an idle method of killing time.

She noticed behind each rock and in every shallow, sheltered place in the stream a plentiful gathering of tiny red stones. They were of a pale, ruby cast, and mostly flawed; dainty trifles, translucent and full of light when she held them to the sun. She began a search for a larger specimen. It might mount nicely into a stickpin for Bill, she thought; a memento of the Klappan Range.

And in this search she came upon a large, rusty pebble, snuggled on the downstream side of an over-hanging rock right at the water's edge. It attracted her first by its symmetrical form, a perfect oval; then, when she lifted it, by its astonis.h.i.+ng weight. She continued her search for the pinkish-red stones, carrying the rusty pebble along. Presently she worked her way back to where Roaring Bill labored prodigiously.

"I feel ashamed to be loafing while you work so hard, Billy-boy," she greeted.

"Give me a kiss and I'll call it square," he proposed cheerfully. "Got to work like a beaver, kid. This hot weather'll put us to the bad before long. There'll be ten feet of water roaring down here one of these days."

"Look at these pretty stones I found," she said. "What are they, Bill?"

"Those?" He looked at her outstretched palm. "Garnets."

"Garnets? They must be valuable, then," she observed. "The creek's full of them."

"Valuable? I should say so," he grinned. "I sent a sample to a Chicago firm once. They replied to the effect that they would take all I could deliver, and pay thirty-six dollars a ton, f. o. b., my nearest railroad station."

"Oh!" she protested. "But they're pretty."

"Yes, if you can find one of any size. What's the other rock?" he inquired casually. "You making a collection of specimens?"

"That's just a funny stone I found," she returned. "It must be iron or something. It's terribly heavy for its size."

"Eh? Let me see it," he said.

She handed it over.

He weighed it in his palm, scrutinized it closely, turning it over and over. Then he took out his knife and scratched the rusty surface vigorously for a few minutes.

"Huh!" he grunted. "Look at your funny stone."

He held it out for her inspection. The blade of his knife had left a dull, yellow scar.

"Oh!" she gasped. "Why--it's gold!"

"It is, woman," he declaimed, with mock solemnity. "Gold--glittering gold!

"Say, where did you find this?" he asked, when Hazel stared at the nugget, dumb in the face of this unexpected stroke of fortune.

"Just around the second bend," she cried. "Oh, Bill, do you suppose there's any more there?"

"Lead me to it with my trusty pan and shovel, and we'll see," Bill smiled.

Forthwith they set out. The overhanging bowlder was a scant ten minute's walk up the creek.

Bill leaned on his shovel, and studied the ground. Then, getting down on his knees at the spot where the marks of Hazel's scratching showed plain enough, he began to paw over the gravel.

Within five minutes his fingers brought to light a second lump, double the size of her find. Close upon that he winnowed a third. Hazel leaned over him, breathless. He sifted the gravel and sand through his fingers slowly, picking out and examining all that might be the precious metal, and as he picked and clawed the rusty, brown nuggets came to light. At last he reached bottom. The bowlder thrust out below in a natural shelf. From this Bill carefully sc.r.a.ped the acc.u.mulation of black sand and gravel, gleaning as a result of his labor a baker's dozen of a.s.sorted chunks--one giant that must have weighed three pounds. He sat back on his haunches, and looked at his wife, speechless.

"Is that truly _all_ gold, Bill?" she whispered incredulously.

"It certainly is--as good gold as ever went into the mint," he a.s.sured.

"All laid in a nice little nest on this shelf of rock. I've heard of such things up in this country, but I never ran into one before--and I've always taken this pocket theory with a grain of salt. But there you are. That's a real, honest-to-G.o.d pocket. And a well-lined one, if you ask me. This rusty-colored outside is oxidized iron--from the black sand, I guess. Still, it might be something else. But I know what the inside is, all right, all right."

"My goodness!" she murmured. "There might be wagonloads of it in this creek."

"There might, but it isn't likely." Bill shook his head. "This is a simon-pure pocket, and it would keep a graduate mineralogist guessing to say how it got here, because it's a different proposition from the wash gold in the creek bed. I've got all that's here, I'm pretty sure.

And you might prospect this creek from end to end and never find another nugget bigger than a pea. It's rich placer ground, at that--but this pocket's almost unbelievable. Must be forty pounds of gold there. And you found it. You're the original mascot, little person."

He bestowed a bearlike hug upon her.

"Now what?" she asked. "It hardly seems real to pick up several thousand dollars in half an hour or so like this. What will we do?"

"Do? Why, bless your dear soul," he laughed. "We'll just consider ourselves extra lucky, and keep right on with the game till the high water makes us quit."