"One man digs up the pay dirt an' chucks it in at the top o' the cradle. Another dips up bucket after bucket o' water, continuous, an' sloshes it in; it's his job, too, to break up the soft lumps an' keep stirrin' the pasty mess, an' to keep the cradle full o' water. The third man goes rock, rockin', without stoppin', hours at a time. Mostly, the pardners spell each other off."
"But I should think a good deal of gold would be washed away by that system," objected Clem, "surely the rocking must dash some of it over the riffles."
"Some does go," Jim agreed, "but a gang can handle so much more pay dirt in a day that it more'n makes up. Three men with a cradle can handle twice as much dirt as the three men workin' separately would, each with a pan. Team work pays, in minin'—if you can trust your pardners.
"Just about the time I was born, Father made pardners with five other prospectors, all pannin' on the Carson. Their claims were all in a string, one after the other, so they figures on makin' a sluice. That's jest a long trough. In richer an' more settled camps they're made of iron, length after length, all ready to be fixed together like a stove-pipe, but on the Carson, they was jest hollowed-out logs.
"Sluices was always a foot deep, a foot an' a half wide, an' as long as could be made, slopin' slightly, so the water wouldn't run too fast or too slow, an' wi' riffles every few inches all along. The six claims I'm tellin' about give a chance for a sluice over a hundred foot long. To save the trouble o' liftin' water up in a pail, or pumpin' it, Father made a sort o' small flume, leadin' from the river higher up right into the sluice, so's the water would run continuous.
"Bein' there was six o' them, the pardners worked three shifts, eight hours each. One man dug the dirt, wheeled it in a barrow to the head o' the sluice an' dumped it on a wooden platform. The other shoveled it into the sluice, stirred it up, an' broke up the lumps when they got pasty. Eight hours o' that was a day's work, I'm tellin'! Mother, she cooked an' washed for all six men, aside lookin' after me. Wi' meals to be got for all three shifts, she was kep' busy.
"The sluice didn't stop runnin', day nor night, for a month at a stretch. Then the water in the flume was turned off, the sluice, riffles an' platform were scraped clean wi' knives, an' all six pardners panned the scrapin's. That was the clean-up. It was divided by weight o' dust into seven equal parts, Mother gettin' a man's share."
"Didn't they use any mercury at all on the Carson?" queried Owens.
"After a bit, our gang did. Not until each man had a bag o' dust set aside, big enough to buy a few weeks' grub, though. They'd all got badly bit in Californy, an' quicksilver cost a lot o' money in them days."
"What's the quicksilver for?" queried Clem.