The Boy held the double handful of well-washed gold up to the sunshine, feeling to the full the immemorial spell cast by the King of Metals. Nothing that men had ever made out of gold was so entirely beautiful as this.
Scowl Austin's grim gratification was openly heightened with the rich man's sense of superiority, but his visitor seemed to have forgotten him.
"Colonel! here a minute. We thought it looked wonderful enough on the Big Chimney table—but Lord! to see it like this, out o' doors, mixed with sunshine and water!"
Still he stood there fascinated, leaning heavily against the sluice-box, still with his dripping hands full, when, after a hurried glance, the Colonel returned to his own box. None of the gang ever talked in the presence of the owner.
"Guess that looks good to you." Austin slightly stressed the pronoun. He had taken a reasonless liking for the young man, who from the first had smiled into his frowning face, and treated him as he treated others. Or perhaps Austin liked him because, although the Boy did a good deal of "gassin' with the gang," he had never hung about at clean-ups. At all events, he should stay to-night, partly because when the blue devils were down on Scowl Austin nothing cheered him like showing his "luck" off to someone. And it was so seldom safe in these days. People talked. The authorities conceived unjust suspicions of a man's returns. And then, far back in his head, that vague need men feel, when a good thing has lost its early zest, to see its dimmed value shine again in an envious eye. Here was a young fellow, who, before he went lame, had been all up and down the creek for days looking for a job—probably hadn't a penny—livin' off his friend, who himself would starve but for the privilege Austin gave him of washing out Austin's gold. Let the young man stop and see the richest clean-up at the Forks.
And so it was with the acrid pleasure he had promised himself that he said to the visitor, bending over the double handful of gold, "Guess it looks good to you."
"Yes, it looks good!" But he had lifted his eyes, and seemed to be studying the man more than the metal.
A couple of newcomers, going by, halted.
"Christ!" said the younger, "look at that!"
The Boy remembered them; they had been to Seymour only a couple of hours before asking for work. One was old for that country—nearly sixty—and looked, as one of the gang had said, "as if, instid o' findin' the pot o' gold, he had got the end of the rainbow slam in his face—kind o' blinded."