"I think," said Harry, after Pat had left, with much good-will and another reference to pie, and the two partners prepared for bed, "that tomorrow we'll make a tour around the camp, to see what other folks are doing, and then we'll know how to go about it the quickest way. Panning is too slow for us."
CHAPTER XIII
READY FOR BIG BUSINESS, BUT * * * !
When after breakfast they started out, "for (as Harry said) the latest wrinkles in getting rich quick," the gulch was already astir and at work. And a busy, inspiring sight it was, alive from side to side and apparently from end to end with cabins, completed or begun, some plank-roofed, some roofed with pine boughs; with dug-outs, tents, wagons, oxen, mules, and with men digging, burrowing, toiling at spade and pick, squatting over gold-pans, or manipulating the boxes set on rockers, while the few women were attending to dishes or hanging out the family washing.
"Washing $3 a dozen," announced a sign in front of one tent.
The gulch was long and broken, and of course not half the sights were to be seen from any one point.
"Let's walk up a piece, first," suggested Harry.
So they did, in confident manner. Only day before yesterday they had come in as tenderfeet—not knowing a thing and not owning a foot of ground. Now they were regular residents, actual miners, with a paying claim and a cabin, and might hold up their heads. The very dirt on their clothes proclaimed their rank. Terry felt like a wealthy citizen.
The man who evidently owned the claim next above theirs paused to greet them. He was another young man, with a blond beard, and a smile that disclosed white even teeth, and although he was roughly dressed in ragged red flannel shirt, belted trousers and heavy cow-hide boots, his chest, showing under his shirt, which was open at the throat, was very white, and now as he rested his foot upon his spade and shoved back his slouch hat, his forehead also was very white.