“Oh, yes. My partners and I spent one season up there prospecting, and altogether we managed to get together a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of the yellow stuff.”
“That was pretty good.”
“Tidy.”
“Then how do you make out that you lost by it?”
“Just this way. When we got back to civilisation and totted up, allowing fairly for the time it took and the cost of travelling, and what we might have done, say at work earning eight or ten dollars a week each, we reckoned that we were out of pocket.”
“Indeed?” said Brace, staring.
“Yes. Gold-hunting’s gambling. One man out of five hundred—or say a thousand—makes a pile: half of them don’t make wages, and the other half make themselves ill, if they don’t lose their lives. So I call it gambling.”
“Don’t gamble then,” said Sir Humphrey, who had waded to where they stood: and he looked on smiling. “Well, what fortune?”
“Nothing in mine,” said Brace, “and—nothing in Briscoe’s.”
“Wrong,” said the American: “you’re new to the work, anyone can tell. There’s plenty here to pay well.”