“Hold it as long as you want to!” Murtry was shouting after him. “Hold it till you get good an’ tired of doing assessment work on it! Wait a minute till I tell you something you’d just as well know now as later!” Benton paused and Murtry continued. “There ain’t any gold in that gulch, but even if there was, you’d never get to work it. I’ve got the water an’ I aim to keep it!”
The old-timer was right. He was right about everything! He had said that Joe Murtry was the meanest man in Alaska; he had said that no matter how much gold the tiny gulch might carry, Murtry would never allow it to be worked. Benton considered the various things that the old-timer had told him until he reached his camp in Benton Gulch. Well, he decided, he would follow the old man’s advice and quit the gulch on the following day.
Benton had been prospecting the gulch every day for more than a week. Through force of habit he took his pick, shovel and gold pan, and went to work in the narrow cut which he had been running into a shoulder of the hill near his tent. He was far from an expert with the gold pan, but he enjoyed the beginner’s thrill, which always came when he “tailed off” the residue in the pan, and saw the streak of yellow trickling behind the black sand.
Young Benton extended his cut three feet into the hill. He was following along the disintegrated slate bed rock; although he did not realize it, the bedrock was totally different. Before it had been “slick,” now it was rough and “rotten.”
He filled his pan with gravel and carried it to a hole which he had dug in the gulch’s channel. Now the hole was filled with water from the melting snows; in a week, perhaps, it would be dry. At least the old-timer had said that it would, and Benton was now a firm believer in the wisdom of the old man.
It is a maxim with old-timers that “many things are mistaken for gold, but gold is never mistaken for anything else.” A greenhorn is often fooled, for example, by iron pyrites and “cube” iron, but when he discovers gold, the real thing, he knows. So it was with Benton. For a week he had been panning “pinhead stuff” that would “rattle in the pan.” Now, as he “tailed off” the pan he had taken from the disintegrated bed rock, he saw that a half-dozen dull-yellow pieces of gold were in the bottom of the pan. Benton’s old-timer would have pronounced them slugs.
Benton was excited. He held the slugs in the palm of his hand, while he attempted to estimate their value. The smallest of them, he decided, was fully twice as large as a five-dollar gold piece; the largest was surely worth more than twenty dollars. The six slugs would total almost a hundred dollars. Chechahco that he was, Benton still knew that he had uncovered bonanza dirt.
Young Benton went again to his cut. This time he worked feverishly for two hours. His pay streak was rich, extremely so, but there was a heavy overburden to handle. In other words, above the pay he had discovered on bed rock, lay ten, twenty, possibly as much as fifty feet of muck and gravel. Undoubtedly the ground was rich enough that he could take out hundreds of dollars that summer without water, but if he could only manage to get that sluicehead from Caribou Creek, he could with a pressure hose, run that overburden off like so much soup. He must have that water? But how?
At five o’clock next morning young Benton was seated on the stump of a spruce where the clear waters of Caribou Creek gushed into the brown foam-flecked river. He looked at Murtry’s river boat which was beached near by. It rested on two fresh-peeled logs, and Benton saw that all preparations had been recently made to launch the vessel. At six o’clock, Murtry and one of his men put in an appearance. Benton had no time to lose; he spoke to Murtry at once.
“Murtry,” he said, without rising from his stump, “I’ve been thinking the matter over and I wonder if you would consider selling me a sluice head of water from Caribou Crick. I’ll pay you what it is worth.”