In front of the bar men crowded closer, craning their necks, and elbowing one another, as their feet made soft shuffling sounds upon the hardwood floor. One of the man's hands slipped into a side pocket of his coat and when it came out something thudded heavily upon the bar. Brent saw the object plainly as the bartender reached for it, a small buckskin pouch, its surface glazed with the grease and soot of many campfires. He had seen men carry their tobacco in just such pouches, but this pouch held no tobacco, it had thumped the bar heavily and lay like a sack of sand.
The bartender untied the strings and stood with the pouch poised above the scales while his eyes roved over the eager, expectant faces of the crowd. Then he placed a small weight upon the pan of the scales and poured something slowly from the pouch into the small scoop upon the opposite side. From his position Brent could see the delicate scales oscillate and finally strike a balance. The bartender closed the pouch and handed it back to the owner. Then he picked up the scales and returned them to their place beside the cash register, while in front of the bar men surged about the pouch owner clawing and shoving to get next to him, and all talking
at once, nobody paying the slightest attention to the bartenders who were vainly trying to serve a round of drinks.
The head bartender returned to his position opposite Brent, and reaching for the decanter, poured himself a drink. "Drink up and have one on the stranger—he just set 'em up to the house."
Brent swallowed the liquor in his glass and refilled it: "What's the excitement?" he asked, "A man don't ordinarily get as popular as he seems to be just because he buys a round of drinks, does he?"
"Didn't you see it? It ain't the round of drinks, it's—wait—" He stepped to the back bar and lifting the scoop from the scales set it down in front of Brent, "That's what it is—gold! Yes sir, pure gold just as she comes from the sand—nuggets and dust. It's be'n many a year since any of that stuff has been passed over this bar for the drinks. I've be'n here seven years and it's the first I've took in, except now and then a few colors that some hombre's washed out of some dry coulee or creek bed—fine dust that's cost him the shovelin' an' pannin' of tons of gravel. Patsy keeps the scales settin' around for a curiosity—that, an' because the old-timers likes to see 'em handy. Kind of reminds 'em of the early days an' starts 'em gassin'. But this here's the real stuff. Look at that boy." He poked with his finger at an irregular nugget the size of a navy bean, "Looks like a
chunk of slag—an' that ain't all! He's got a bag full of 'em. I held it in my hand, an' it weighed pounds!"
As Brent stood looking down at the grains of yellow metal in the little scoop a strange uneasiness stirred deep within him. He picked up the nugget and held it in the palm of his hand. One side of it was flat, as though polished by a thousand years of water-wear, and the other side was rough and fire-eaten as though fused by a mighty heat. Brent had seen plenty of gold—coined gold, gold fashioned by the goldsmith's art, and gold in bricks and ingots, in the production of which he himself had been a factor. Yet never before had the sight of gold moved him. It had been merely a valuable metal which it was his business to help extract from certain rocks by certain processes of chemistry and expensive machinery. Yet here in his hand was a new kind of gold—gold that seemed to reach into the very heart of him with a personal appeal. Raw gold—gold that had known the touch of neither chemicals nor machinery, but that had been wrested by the bare hands of a man from some far place where the fires of a glowing world and the glacial ice-drift had fashioned it. The vague uneasiness that had stirred him at sight of the yellow grains, flamed into a mighty urge at its touch. He, too, would go and get gold—and he would get it not by process of brain, but by process of brawn. Not by means of chemicals and machinery, but by slash
ing into the sides of mountains, and ripping the guts out of creeks! Carefully he returned the nugget to the scoop, and as he raised his eyes to the bartender's, he moistened his lips with his tongue.
"Where did he get it?" he asked, huskily.