“She’s acquainted here, I presume,” said Tom Cameron. “Maybe she doesn’t wish to be seen with you girls. Her outfit is so very different from yours.”
“Poor Min!” murmured Ruth again. “Do you suppose she has found her father?”
Tom could not tell her that, and they trailed along behind the others, up toward the bench where the hydraulic mining was going on.
Only one of the nozzles was being worked—shooting a solid stream three inches in diameter into the hillside, and shaving off great slices that melted and ran in a creamlike paste down into the sluice-boxes. Half a hundred “muckers” were at work with pick and shovel below the bench. The man managing the hydraulic machine stood astride of it, in hip boots and slicker, and guided the spouting stream of water along the face of the raw hill.
The party of spectators stood well out of the way, for the work of hydraulic mining has attached to it no little danger. The force of the stream from the nozzle of the machine is tremendous; and sometimes there are accidents, when many tons of the hillside unexpectedly cave down upon the bench.
The man astride the nozzle, however, took the matter coolly enough. He was smoking a short pipe and plowed along the face of the rubble with his deadly stream as easily as though he were watering a lawn.
“And if he should shoot it this way,” said Tom, “he’d wash us down off the bench as though we were pebbles.”
“Ugh! Let’s not talk about that,” murmured Rebecca Frayne, shivering.
“Oh, girls!” burst out Helen, “see that man, will you?”
“What man?” asked Trix.