“What’s vat?”
“That’s ‘panning.’ If he’d had a round pan like Sigma’s bread pan, he’d have put some sand and gravel in it, and he would fill it to the brim with water, and he’d wash the sand and gravel round and round, picking out all the stones and letting off the water little by little, with a circular motion—so. And all the lighter sand and stuff would get washed out; and by and by, if the miner knows his business, any gold that may have been in that sand, every particle, is left behind in the bottom of the pan.”
“Gwacious! Vat would be luck!” said Jack, with enthusiasm.
“No, it isn’t luck. It’s skill and specific gravity.”
“Why didn’t ve man twy it?”
“He hadn’t any pan. He hadn’t even a shovel. I’ve seen it done very cleverly with a shovel. I’ve seen it done with a saucer. He had nothing. How was he going to find out if there was any more of that stuff there? Had this one nugget by any chance been dropped? No, that was absurd. Who could have dropped it? But he looked up the bank where the bones shone, and out of the coarse grass a skull grinned at him. Not a wolf’s skull, or a deer’s, as he’d thought. A human being’s—a white man’s, perhaps. Had the nugget belonged to him? Had he brought it from some valley far away, and lost his bit of gold as well as his life here under the shadow of the great stone anvil? The graver the man got down there by the water, the broader the one on the bank seemed to grin. Suddenly the living man got up, and ran toward that heap of bones as if he couldn’t rest till he’d found out what the joke was the dead man was laughing at. He picked up the skull, and he saw it was a white man’s.”
“How could he see vat?”
“He looked at the teeth. They were splendid. Good as any savage’s—all but one—one was filled. When he saw that, the castaway knew that probably this white man, who had been here before him, had dropped that nugget in the creek—or it had been washed down there after the wolves had torn the dead man’s clothes. But who could tell! ‘Look here,’ the live man asked, ‘what did happen?’ But the other wouldn’t say a word, just went on grinning in that irritating way of his. So the live man picked up two stones, and got out his big clasp-knife, and he went at that skull with might and main, sawing at it with the knife (which was no good at all), and hammering with first one stone and then another, working away like one possessed.”
“Did he weally fink he could make ve skull tell him somefing?” and Jack Galbraith laughed aloud at so foolish an adventurer.
“Seemed as if he thought he’d get some satisfaction out of it, from the way he kept on. By the time the Esquimau boy got back with the jack-snipe, the white man had hammered away everything from that skull except the round basin of the cranium—this part, you know. The Esquimau boy was horrified, and made signs of disapproval.