"Oh yes!" cried St. John with the utmost animation, "there is plenty more, only see here!" and with these words, he fished out three or four spoonfuls of gravel from a narrow cleft in the ledge.
On his way home his inexperience was continually leading him into fresh vagaries, and I was very glad that neither of the scientific miners happened to be present, as such shocking perversity could not have failed to arouse their most virtuous indignation. He walked with his eyes fixed on the ground, like a man looking for lost treasure, and trod softly, as if he expected to come upon it by surprise. The yellow mica that glittered among the sand was a never-ending source of deception. At every step he discovered a spot that he was sure must have gold in it, or, at any rate, it would do no harm to try. It was in vain that we assured him that we had tried it already—that we even pointed out to him the very holes we had dug, as indeed they might be seen at intervals of three or four rods all up and down the river; wherever there was room for another hole between two already existing, his ignorant faith and ardour, now in their newest gloss, insisted upon making the experiment. We spared no pains to convince him of his mischievous error—we knew that the unpalatable truth must sooner or later be forced upon him, and the sooner the nauseous draught was swallowed the better for his peace.
We well remembered "with what compulsion and laborious flight we sunk thus low," and would gladly have spared him the same lingering painful process. But instead of gratefully receiving our well meant ridicule and friendly expostulation, he only hardened himself the more, and we were at length compelled to let the disease run its natural course.
The passing gleam of sunshine that shone on us immediately after his arrival, confirmed him in his heretical opinion, and it was not till he had spent several days in prospecting that any change for the better was discernible in his behaviour.
Having thus enlarged our business, a single rocker was no longer sufficient, and we commenced the construction of another that same afternoon. I finished it during the whole of Monday, while Tertium and St. John went up the river to make their first experiment in our new territory. Their report was not very encouraging—they brought back at night only eight dollars; but as St. John attributed this result entirely to the rocker, which was indeed a wretched affair, and I attributed it, in part at least, to my not being there to see, Tertium was the only one seriously disturbed by their ill fortune.
The next day fully justified my expectations. The earth was a most tenacious clay mixed with stones and gravel; the whole forming a solid mass of concrete that yielded slowly and painfully only to repeated blows. In spite, however, of this extraordinary hardness, and the distance of the bank from the river, one of us found little difficulty in digging and carrying as fast as the other two could wash, the clayey nature of the soil impeding this operation even more than the first. We had now discarded the raisin box, with a hoop nailed to its sides for a handle, which had hitherto served us for carrying earth, and had substituted a couple of aristocratic wooden buckets, and a very convenient implement known in some parts of the country as a sap yoke, which if not very flattering in its associations, at least made our labour a good deal easier. We rested at noon only long enough to eat the luncheon we had brought with us, and returned home at an early hour, where, on weighing the proceeds of our day's labour, we found we had just an ounce and a half.
Our bank continued to pay larger and larger dividends all the rest of the week till Saturday, when from one hundred and eighty buckets we washed out nearly three ounces, more than we had ever obtained before. After this the tide began to ebb, and our earnings gradually fell off from forty to thirty, from thirty to twenty, and from twenty to fifteen, when, it being near the end of March, we finally abandoned the place to go up into the mountains.
The month of February was unusually cold, rainy, and disagreeable; the sky was smooched with clouds, and there were one or two thick flights of snow, which melted, however, as soon as it reached the earth. On the 18th, Dr. Browne, accompanied by the snuffy Scotchman, and several others from the neighbourhood, set out for the mountains; but they encountered a violent snow storm soon after leaving Coloma, and California Hat, who went with them, became disheartened and returned to Mormon Island to wait for a more favourable season. Oldbuck, who had in vain dissuaded his companions from their enterprise, and still remained inactive in his snug quarters, could not conceal his gratification at the turn things had taken, both because he was vexed that they had not, as usual, been governed by his advice, and because his superior sagacity had been so signally illustrated. He now invited Number Four to lodge at his tent, and we were thus relieved from that horror of all saving housewives, the necessity of making up a spare bed every night, as we had done since St. John's arrival.
One Sunday, about the middle of March, while we were sunning ourselves in front of our tent, our attention was attracted by a sudden commotion under the bank, a little to the right of the village, and which was the same so emphatically denounced by the second scientific miner. Hurrying to the spot, we found a large crowd desperately at work digging out two men who had just been buried beneath a large mass of earth. The unfortunate victims of their own guilty imprudence had been picking out the thin stratum of rubble at the bottom of the bank, when the overhanging cliff, which was composed of a fine sand, some twenty feet in depth, fell in sudden ruin on their heads. In about fifteen minutes a shout from one of the workmen proclaimed that one of the bodies had been found. It was a shocking spectacle—blood, and dirt, and death—the head first, falling on the breast, then the nerveless arm, and at last, the whole poor, deserted body—how swift had been the flight of the startled garrison, at that dread alarm, along the winding ways of the heart and veins.
This incident confirmed the remark so often made as to the insensibility of the miner to the fate of his companions. Though there were of course some exceptions, the indifference generally manifested on such occasions seemed to argue that charity and humanity are not the natural spontaneous growth of the human heart, but a forced and artificial production that can exist only in the hot-bed of permanent society. After satisfying their curiosity to hear the name and residence of the deceased, the crowd disperses, and the whole matter is speedily forgotten amid more exciting interests, or remembered only as a bit of gossip a little out of the common course. If the sufferers have any friends to perform for them the last sad offices, they are carried to their final resting-place with little of that solemnity that seems inseparable from such a ceremony; and if not, they are hurried into the ground with still more indecent haste.