He filled his gold pan from the wheelbarrow, and dumped it into the grizzly, taking from each pan the brightest-colored pebble he could find to place on the pile with others so that when the day’s work was done he could tell how many pans he had washed and so form some idea as to how the dirt was running per cubic yard.
His dipper was a ten-pound lard can with a handle ingeniously attached, and as he dipped water from the river into the grizzly, the steady, mechanical motion of the rocker and dipper had the regularity of a machine. If he touched the dirt with so much as his finger tips he washed them carefully over the grizzly lest some tiny particle be lost. Bruce was as good a rocker as a Chinaman, and than that there is no higher praise.
When the black sand began to coat the Brussels-carpet apron, Bruce stooped over the rocker frequently and looked at the shining yellow specks.
“She’s looking fine to-day! She’s running five dollars to the cubic yard if she’s running a cent!” he ejaculated each time that he straightened up after an inspection of the sand, and the fire of hope and enthusiasm, which is close to the surface in every true miner and prospector, shone in his eyes. Sometimes he frowned at the rocker and expressed his disapproval aloud, for years in isolated places had given him the habit of loneliness, and he talked often to himself. “It hasn’t got slope enough, and I knew it when I was making it. I don’t believe I’m saving more than seventy per cent. I’ll tell you, hombre, grade is everything with this fine gold and heavy sand.”
While he rocked he lifted his eyes and searched the sides of the mountains across the river. It seemed a trifle less lonely if occasionally he caught a glimpse of Slim, no bigger than an insect, crawling over the rocks and around the peaks. Yet each time that he saw him Bruce’s heavy black eyebrows came together in a troubled frown, for the sight reminded him of the increasing frequency of their quarrels.
“If he hadn’t soldiered,” he muttered as he saw Slim climbing out of a gulch, “he could have had a good little grub-stake for winter. Winter’s going to come quick, the way the willows are turning black. Let it come. I’ve got to pull out, anyhow, as things are going. But”—his eyes kindled as he looked at the high bank into which his tunnel ran—“I certainly am getting into great dirt.”
It was obvious that the sand bar where he was placering had once been the river bed, but when the mighty stream, in the course of centuries, cut into the mountain opposite it changed the channel, leaving bed rock and bowlders, which eventually were covered by sand and gravel deposited by the spring floods. In this deposit there was enough flour-gold to enable any good placer miner to make days’ wages by rocking the rich streaks along the bars and banks.
This particular sand bar rose from a depth of five feet near the water’s edge to a height of two hundred feet or more against the mountain at the back. There was enough of it carrying fine gold to inflame the imagination of the most conservative and set the least speculative to calculating. A dozen times a day Bruce looked at it and said to himself:
“If only there was some way of getting water on it!”
For many miles on that side of the river there was no mountain stream to flume, no possibility of bringing it, even from a long distance, through a ditch, so the slow and laborious process he was employing seemed the only method of recovering the gold that was but an infinitesimal proportion of what he believed the big bar contained.