Beth said: "Oh." She turned a little red.
"Yep, good old cuss, Dave is, though. No good for a seafearing man, however. He could never learn to swear—he ain't got no ear for music."
He returned to his shovel. He and Gettysburg worked in silence for fifteen minutes. Old Dave returned and joined them. Gettysburg tuned up for another of his songs, the burden of which was the tale of a hen-pecked man.
Once more at its end Napoleon looked up and spat on his hands.
"There ain't nothing that can keep some women down 'cept a gravestone—and I've seen some gravestones which was tilted."
Despite the interest and amusement she felt in it all, Beth was becoming sleepy as she sat there in the sun. She shook off the spell and arose, approaching closer to the bank and flume where Gettysburg was toiling. He labored on, silently, for several minutes, then paused, straightened up by degrees, as if the folds in his back were stubborn, and looked at their visitor steadily, his glass eye particularly fixed. One of his hands pulled down his jaw, and then it closed up with a thump.
"Guess this kind of a racket is sort of new to you, Mr. Kent," he ventured. "Ever seen gold washin' before?"
"No," Beth confessed, "and I don't see where the gold is to come from now."
Gettysburg chuckled. "Holy toads! Miners do a heap of work and never see it neither. Me and Van and Napoleon has went through purg and back, many's the time, and was lucky to git out with our skeletons, sayin' nuthin' about the gold."
"Oh." She could think of nothing else to say.