[CHAPTER XVIII.]
Friday, August 10th, we arrived at Natoma, neither richer nor poorer than when we left that place four months before, but yet congratulating ourselves that it was no worse. Hundreds, who had like us illustrated the fable of the Dog and the Shadow, had not escaped half so easily, having lost not only the whole summer, but all their previous earnings. Nowhere else is it so true that a rolling stone gathers no moss; and nowhere else has the said stone the same temptation to roll as in California.
We found Tertium domiciliated with Number Four in a tent which the latter had erected with such taste and elegance as might in the mines fairly be termed magnificent. The interior was decorated with bright blankets of different colours, and festoons of cedar;—the floor covered with a carpet of snowy canvass; and the cot bedsteads standing on opposite sides seemed to promise the highest possible amount of single blessedness. Some Vandal had applied a torch to our former camp, and nothing now remained but a black unsightly blot. We pitched our tent hard by, and having concocted a savoury lobster salad, fell to thinking most vigorously what we should do next. By the time we had discussed the salad, we had come to the conclusion to make another attack upon the bank we had deserted in the spring, where we hoped to find work enough to last till winter, and gold enough to take us home, and buy a suit of clothes in which to present ourselves to our admiring friends. We had long before this been compelled to abandon our original purpose of returning home like princes in disguise, clothed in rags and tatters, but having a royal ransom hidden beneath every patch.
The spot we now selected for our encampment was in the centre of the short ravine already described, and a little beyond the part we proposed to work. Close by the side of the tent the bank rose abruptly to the height of ten or twelve feet, and leaning over it, on its very verge, stood a gigantic pine, with long heavy branches,—its roots, bare and knotted, seeming, like the barky claws of the Arabian roc, to gripe fast hold of the soil. Between the ravine and the river rose a small rocky island, or what would have been such ages before, with a few bushes resembling the horse-chestnut growing on the scanty patches of earth among bald masses of polished granite. Directly in front of this island a party of miners called the South Fork Damming Company were making preparations to drain the river; and among its numbers we found the same ubiquitous individual so often mentioned as the Judge. Between this point and Mormon Island several other companies were occupied in the same manner, and large piles of lumber, to be used in constructing their various flumes, were already scattered here and there along the banks.
Our old claim still remained as we left it, no one having had the hardihood to assail its impregnable front now baked into yet greater hardness by a five months' drought. It was easy to see at a single glance that there was work enough there for a hundred men; as to the gold, that remained to be decided. We were in no hurry, however, to commence the attack; it was necessary first to reconnoitre the bank; digging with the pick was very laborious, and we might perhaps devise some easier way; the heat was excessive, and in the mean time we had enough to do in making our home more comfortable. We built a bower before the door to serve as a dining-room, and drove a number of stout stakes into the ground to support the smooth stone slab that furnished us with a table. At a little distance we built a rude fireplace of stones. The pine-cones that covered the ground made an excellent fuel; our frying-pan and coffee-pot set up their wonted song as cheerfully as ever, and once more our little Lares and Penates came frisking and capering round our hearthstone. We now made up our minds to remain another winter.
On Mormon Island, standing like a goose on one leg in the edge of the river, was a tall awkward water-wheel, turning round with the current, and dipping up with its long arms a quantity of water, which falling into a wide spout was thence conducted into a shallow trough fifteen feet long and as many inches in width. A miner standing by the side of the trough threw into it, from time to time, several buckets of earth, which being carried along by the water to a riddle or sieve at the lower end, fell in a hundred little streams into a shallow box below. Its contents were thus kept in a constant state of agitation, and the gold working its way beneath the surface was saved, while the greater part of the sand and gravel was floated off by the water. This simple apparatus was called by the imposingly suggestive title of Long Tom. The advantage it possessed over the common cradle in enabling us to wash a larger quantity of earth was more than counterbalanced by the difficulties that would beset the use of so cumbrous an ally as the wheel. Yet the wheel was with us the principal attraction,—the splash of its paddles made a pleasing concert, and it performed its task so easily and cheerfully that it was a comfort to look at it.
My urgency having at length prevailed over the wiser counsels of St. John, Tertium maintaining a strict neutrality, we were yet obliged to wait several weeks for the big-bellied carpenter to construct the apparatus, and for the South Fork company to turn the river into their canal, on the edge of which we proposed to set up our works.
In the mean time we were led to embark in an enterprise more weighty than any of our previous operations, and which, after various disappointments, was at length, and in the most unexpected manner, crowned with success.
A quarter of a mile above our tent, a party of miners were engaged in repairing a dam that had been built the preceding summer, and had paid its original proprietors over fifty thousand dollars. The new-comers, who had taken the name of the Washington Damming and Mining Company, had already made considerable headway in the undertaking, and expected in another week to get to work in the bed of the river. One of the members, intending to leave the mines, offered us his share for one hundred and fifty dollars; after some hesitation, we paid the money; and the next day I listened, with becoming gravity, to the reading of the constitution and by-laws, signed my name to that important document, and went to work with the rest.