As the outcome of the chance meeting Bruce bought the machines upon Jennings’s recommendation with a saving of much money and Jennings furthermore was engaged to make the necessary repairs and install the plant on the river. It was a load off Bruce’s mind to feel that this part of the work was safe in the hands of a practical, experienced man accustomed to coping with the emergencies which arise when working far from transportation facilities.
Once this was settled there was nothing more for Bruce to do in the city and a great deal to be done upon the river, so he bade good-bye to Jennings and left immediately.
On the journey from the Pacific coast to Spokane the gritting of the car-wheels was a song of success, of achievement. Bruce felt himself alive to the finger-tips with the joy of at last being busy at something worth while. He looked back upon the times when he had thought himself happy with profound pity for his ignorance.
When he had stretched himself at night on his mattress of pine-boughs with his head on the bear-grass pillow watching through the cabin window the moon rise out of the “draw” where Big Squaw creek headed, he had thought that he was happy. When he had found a bit of float that “panned,” a ledge that held possibilities, or the yellow flakes had shown up thicker than usual in the day’s clean-up he had called this satisfaction, the momentary exhilaration, happiness. When he had landed a battling “red-side” after a struggle and later thrust his fork through the crisp, brown skin into its steaming pink flesh he had characterized that animal contentment such as any clod might have, as happiness. Poor fool, he told himself now, he had not known the meaning of the word.
His day dreams had taken on a different color. His goal was always before him and this goal was represented by the hour when the machinery in the power and pump houses was running smoothly, when a head of water was flowing through the flume and sluice-boxes and the scrapers were handling 1000 cubic yards a day. As he stared through the window at the flying landscape he saw, not the orchards and wheat fields of the great state of Washington, but quicksilver lying thick with amalgam behind the riffles and the scales sagging with precious, yellow, honey-combed chunks of gold still hot from the retort.
Sometimes he found himself anticipating the moment when he should be telegraphing the amount of the clean-up to Helen Dunbar, to Harrah, and to Harrah’s good-naturedly pessimistic friends. Bruce ransacked his brain for somebody in the world to envy, but there was no one.
He had gone directly to the river from the East, taking a surveyor with him, and as soon as his application for the water-right in Big Squaw creek had been granted he got a crew together composed chiefly of the magnates from Ore City who, owing to Dill’s failure to take up the options, found themselves still at leisure and the financial depression unrelieved.
Ore City nursed a grievance against Dill that was some sorer than a carbuncle and it relieved its feelings by inventing punishments should he ever return to the camp which in ingenuity rivalled the tortures of the Inquisition. Bruce, too, often speculated concerning Dill, for it looked as though he had purposely betrayed Sprudell’s interest. Certainly a man of his mining experience knew better than to make locations in the snow and to pass assessment work which was obviously inadequate. From Sprudell, Bruce had heard nothing and engrossed in his new activities all but forgot him and his treachery, his insults and mysterious threats of vengeance.
Before leaving for the Pacific coast to buy machinery, Bruce had mapped out for the crew the work to be done in his absence and now, upon his return, he found great changes had come to the quiet bar on the river. There was a kitchen where Toy reigned, an arbitrary monarch, and a long bunk-house built of lumber sawed by an old-fashioned water-wheel which itself had been laboriously whip-sawed from heavy logs. Across the river the men were straining and lifting and tugging on the green timbers for the 500 feet of trestle which the survey demanded in order to get the 200-feet head that was necessary to develop the 250 horse-power needed for the pumps and scrapers.
Bruce was not long in exchanging the clothes of civilization for the recognized uniform of the miner, and in flannel shirt and overalls he toiled side by side with Porcupine Jim, Lannigan and the other local celebrities on his pay-roll, who by heroic exertions were pushing the trestle foot by foot across Big Squaw creek.