Then Smaltz struck him. Toy fell among the rocks, sprawling backwards. He got to his feet and came back. Once more he clawed and clung and once more Smaltz knocked him down. A third time he returned.
“You’re harder to kill nor a cat,” Smaltz grinned without malice, but he threw him violently against the sluice-box.
Toy lost his balance, toppled, and went over backward, reaching out wildly to save himself as he fell. The water turned him over but he caught the edge of the box. His loose purple “jumper” of cotton and silk ballooned at the back as he swung by one hand in the on-rushing water, thick and yellow with sand, filled with the grinding boulders that came down as, though shot from a catapult, drowning completely his, agonized cry of “Bluce! Bluce!”
It was only a second that he hung with his wild beseeching eyes on Smaltz’s scared face while his frail, old body acted as a wedge for the racing water and the rocks. Then he let go and turned over and over tumbling grotesquely in the wide sluice-box while the rocks pounded and ground him, beat him into insensibility. He shot over the tail-race into the river limp and unresisting, like a dead fish.
XXV
The Clean-Up
Toy’s disappearance was mysterious and complete. There was not a single clue to show which way he had gone, or how, or why. Only one thing seemed certain and that was that his departure was unpremeditated.
His potatoes were in a bucket of water, peeled and ready for dinner; the bread he had set to raise was waiting to be kneaded; his pipe laid on the window sill while his hoarded trinkets for the little Sun Loon were still hidden under the pad of the bed in his tent. His fish-pole in its usual place disposed of the theory that he had fallen in the river, and although trained eyes followed every trail there was not a single telltale track. He had vanished as though he had gone straight up.