"When you have finished that morning exercise of yours, my young hyena, we'll go and get some breakfast," said Alec, whose own face was radiant with pleasure, taking his brother's arm. "We will get as much gold as we can carry, catch the horses, pack up, and be off for home this morning, before any of those worthy, but probably changeable, Wyobrees take it into their heads to visit us."
It did not take the boys very long to eat their breakfast, they were too excited to linger over it, and leaving Murri still solemnly munching away—he had not nearly done—they went back to the pool. They at once began to collect the pieces of gold, and to pile them into little heaps. Some of these lumps still had bits of quartz attached to them, and these the boys rejected, only taking those nuggets which were free from them. It was evident from the rounded and worn condition of the nuggets that they had been subjected to years, perhaps centuries, of grinding and rubbing amongst the stones at the bottom of the pool, into which they had been brought by the torrents, in flood time, from the gold-bearing rocks of the mountain. The strange shape of the rock basin, which the cascade had slowly formed, had prevented the stream from carrying them still farther down the valley.
"Why, Geordie!" suddenly exclaimed Alec, as he added a nugget weighing five or six ounces to his rapidly increasing pile. "What a fool I am. I clean forgot all about carrying the gold back with us. What have we got to pack it in?"
"Canvas bags, which your thoughtful little brother George brought on purpose!" said Geordie, with a grin.
"Well, you are a young Solomon! You think of everything," said Alec, a moment or so later, when his brother came back from his humpie with the shot bags.
"They'll each hold fourteen pounds weight of gold, not troy weight pounds, but honest sixteen ounce pounds, the sort that I like, so that we can tell somewhere about the value of our booty. What is gold worth an ounce?"
"Don't know exactly; something about four pounds."
"Then each of these bags," said Geordie, after two or three minutes of calculation—he was not very quick at figures—"will be worth between seven and eight hundred pounds when it is full!" And he slapped his thigh and capered about on the top of the flat stone on which he was perched.
Putting the value of the gold into figures in this manner seemed to make its worth much more definite to the boys; it was hard to realise, without the aid of numbers, of how great value were those rather ugly-looking, heavy lumps of metal.
"It makes one feel rich merely to handle it, doesn't it?" said Alec, as he threw a smooth little nugget of gold into the open mouth of the bag he was filling.