"'O, of course you are, but then I wanted to help you if I could,' trying to speak quietly and coming close enough to take the instrument of dispute from his hand if he would let me.
"No reply.
"'What did you strike, Pa, that made the shovel ring just now?'
"'Shovel!—ring!—It was ice! bloomin', blasted, infernal ice, I tell you,' he shouted in a rage, standing in black muck almost to his knees, with the same material bespattered over him from head to foot. Indeed his red and perspiring face showed a couple of great, black smirches with which he had unknowingly beautified himself.
"He was fairly sizzling with wrath. 'Git down here yourself, and go to work, and see how you like it,' he shouted excitedly, forgetting his English and everything but that we had encountered an astonishingly hard proposition, and it had gotten the best of us. Like an old clock he was wound up and could not stop.
"'No gold, no nuggets, no grass roots even; nothing but muck and ice!' and another mouthful of big, strong words gurgled from that man's lips like water from an uncorked jug.
"'Don't, Mr. Morrison, don't do that,' said I, in a voice cold as the ice in that four foot hole, 'you may be heard by some one who will report you to the church trustees, and then you will be expelled. At your age it would be a positive disgrace.'
"'Shut your mouth, I tell you,' he yelled, 'I ain't no baby! I know what I'm doing, and I know what I want to do, but it ain't mining on this confounded tundra!'
"At this I clapped my hands over my ears to shut out such language, but he kept on just the same.
"'Did we lease our farm for a whole year with all the machinery and stock, pack up our household furniture and come three thousand miles over this water like the blooming old idiots we are, to dig in a muckhole full of ice? Did we tell our banker that he should have the very first gold we took out of the ground to pay the two hundred dollar mortgage on our town lots? Does this look much like lifting mortgages from anything?'