“Are you glad to see me, Olive?” he asked.
“Why, Jason, what an unnecessary question. Of course I am, more thankful than I can say for your safety.”
“I walked across the hills from the Dumner stage,” he proceeded. “It was something to see Cottarsport on its bay and the Neck and the fishing boats at Planger's wharf. I'd like to have an ounce of gold for every time I thought about it and pictured it and you. Out on the placers of the Calaveras, or the Feather, I got to believing there wasn't any such town, but here it is.” He advanced toward her; she realized that she was about to be kissed, and a painful color dyed her cheeks.
“You'll stop for supper,” she said practically.
“I haven't been home yet, I came right here; I'll see them and be back. I'll bet I find them in the kitchen, with the front stoves cold, in spite of what I wrote and sent. I brought you a present, just for fun, and I'll leave it now, since it's heavy.” He bent over a satchel at his feet and got a buckskin bag, bigger than his two fists, which he dropped with a dull thud on the table.
“What is it, Jason?” she asked. But of herself she knew the answer. He untied a string, and, dipping in his fingers, showed her a fine yellow metallic trickle. “Gold dust, two tumblers full,” he replied. “We used to measure it that way—a pinch a dollar, teaspoonful to the ounce, a wineglass holds a hundred, and a tumbler a thousand dollars.”
She was breathless before the small shapeless pouch that held such a staggering amount. He laughed. “Why, Olive, it's nothing at all. I just brought it like that so you could see how we carried it in California. We are all rich now, Olive—the Burrages, and you're one, and the Staneses. I have close to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
This sum was little more to her than a fable, a thing beyond the scope of her comprehension; but the two thousand dollars before her gaze was a miracle made manifest. There it was to study, feel; subconsciously she inserted her hand in the bag, into the cold, smooth particles.
“A hundred and fifty thousand,” he repeated; “but if you think I didn't work for it, if you suppose I picked it right out of a pan on the river bars, why—why, you are wrong.” Words failed him to express the erroneousness of such conclusions. “I slaved like a Mexican,” he added; “and in bad luck almost to the end.” She sat and gazed at him with an easier air and a growing interest, her hands clasped in her lap. “What I didn't know when I left Cottarsport was wonderful.
“Why, take the mining,” he said with a gesture; “I mean the bowl mining at first... just the heavy work in it killed off most of the prospectors—all day with a big iron pan, half full of clay and gravel, sloshing about in those rivers. And maybe you'd work a month without a glimmer, waking wet and cold under the sierras, whirling the pan round and round; and maybe when you had the iron cleared out with a magnet, and dropped in the quicksilver, what gold was there wouldn't amalgam. I can tell you, Olive, only the best, or the hardest, came through.”