“And that,” Jason Burrage told her, “was how I learned gold mining in California. I sank shafts, too, and worked a windlass till the holes got so deep they had to be timbered and the ore needed a crusher. But after the fluming I knew what to wait for. I kept going in a sort of commerce for a while—buying old outfits and selling them again to the late comers—a pick or shovel would bring ten dollars and long boots fifty dollars a pair. I got twenty-four dollars for a box of Seidlitz powders. Then in 'Fifty-four I went in with three scientific men—one had been a big chemist at Paris—and things took a turn. We had the dead wood on gold. Why, we did nothing but re-travel the American Fork and Indian Bar, the Casumnec and Moquelumne, and work the tailings the earlier miners had piled up and left, just like I had south. We did some pretty things with cyanide; yes, and hydraulics and powder.
“Things took a turn,” he repeated; “investments in stampers and so on, and here I am.”
After he had gone—supper, she had informed him, was at five exactly—Olive had the bewildered feeling of partially waking from an extraordinary dream. Yet the buckskin bag on the table possessed a weighty actuality.
She sat for a long while gazing intently at the gold, which, like a crystal ball, held for her varied reflections. Then, recalling the exigencies of the kitchen, she hurried abruptly away. Her thoughts wheeled about Jason Burrage in a confusion of all the impressions she had ever had of him. But try as she might she could not picture the present man as a part of her life in Cottarsport; she could not see herself married to him, although that event waited just beyond today. She set her lips in a straight line, a fixed purpose gave her courage in place of the timidity inspired by Jason's opulent strangeness—she couldn't allow herself to be turned aside for a moment from the way of righteousness. The gods of mammon, however they might blackly assault her spirit, should be confounded.=
”... hide me
Till the storm of life is past."=
She sang in a high quavering voice. There was a stir beyond—surely Jason wasn't back so soon; but it was Jem.
“What's on the table here?” he called.
“You let that be,” she cried back in a panic at having left the gift so exposed. “That's gold dust; Jason brought it, two thousand dollars' worth.”