A prolonged whistle followed her announcement. Jem appeared with the buckskin bag in his hand. “Why, here's two yawls right in my hand,” he asserted.
“Mind one thing, Jem,” she went on, “he's coming back for supper, and I won't have you and Rhoda at him about boats and singing the minute he's in the house.”
Rhoda, with exclamations, and then Hester, inspected the gold. “I'd slave five years for that,” the latter stated, “and then hardly get it; and here you, have it for nothing.”
“You'll get the good of it too, Hester,” Olive told her.
“I'll just work for what I get,” she replied fiercely. “I won't take a penny from Jason, Olive Stanes; you can't hold that over me, and the sooner you both know it the better.”
“You ought to pray to be saved from pride.”
“I don't ask benefits from any one,” Hester stoutly observed.
“Hester——” Olive commenced, scandalized, but she stopped at Jason's entrance. “Hester she wanted a share of the gold,” Jem declared with a light in his slow gaze, “and Olive was cursing at her.”
“Lots more,” said Jason Burrage, “buckets full.” In spite of the efforts of every one to be completely at ease the supper was unavoidably stiff.
But when Jason had lighted one of his blunt cigars, and begun a vivid description of western life, the Staneses were transported by the marvels following one upon another: a nugget had been picked up over a foot long, it weighed a hundred and ninety pounds, and realized forty-three thousand dollars. “Why, fifty and seventy-five lumps were common,” he asserted. “At Ford's Bar a man took out seven hundred dollars a day for near a month. Another found seventeen thousand dollars in a gutter two or three feet deep and not a hundred yards long.