"Just what I was telling you," says the dealer, very confidential and earnest. "You want to get him away from here quick—I've had some experience in those kinds of cases, and when I see your friend's face, I knew you wanted to get a move on."
"It's dreadful, ain't it?" says Ag. "I believe you're in the right about it—but, say, I feel that I'd ought to pay for the lamp he busted."
"Not at all," says the dealer, as generous as could be. "Not at all! That's an accident might have happened to any gentleman. Now, I'll just take a friend along, and we'll sail right out to your place. Can you drive there?"
"Oh, yes!" said Aggy. "The roads ain't anything extra, but you can make it all right."
So away goes the four of us that afternoon. Ag and me, we felt leary of the fourth man at first. He let on to be considerable of a miner, but after a bit we sized him up.
"Did you ever," says Aggy whilst they was talking this and that about mines, "did you ever run your pay dirt through a ground-sluice rocker that was fitted up with double amalgam plates, top and bottom, and had the apron sewed on to a puddle board that slanted up, instead of down?"
"Why, sure!" says that feller, judging from Aggy's tone of voice that this was the proper thing to do. "We didn't use to handle our dirt no other way out in Uckle-Chuckle county."
"Is that so?" cries Aggy, very much surprised. "Well, do you know that very few people do?"
"It makes me tired," answers the man in a knowing way, "to think of the way some folks mines. Now that you've called my attention to it, I don't recollect that I've heard of anybody using a ground-sluice rocker the way you speak of, since I left old Uckle-Chuckle county." And here I got a little violent again, because I can't conceal my feelings as well as Ag. I had to have several attacks on the way out when Ag was brought to close quarters, but we did pretty well on the trip.
"Well, gentlemen, there's the Golden Queen!" says Aggy when we turned the bend in the creek. "Seems funny that such an uninteresting-looking heap of rocks and stuff as that should be a gold mine, don't it?"