She laughed, as if it were a joke.
“I’m afraid I’m not a very good miner,” she said, “although I suppose I ought to be a yellow-legged expert, having been brought up somewhere within sound of the stamps all my life. Good luck to you. Good-by.”
His reply was almost a mumble, and the black horse started down the trail. He watched her, with a sinking, hungry heart. Just as the crag was almost abreast of her mount, she turned and called back: “Oh, I forgot to say that I shall probably come here almost every day.”
He did not understand, until long afterward, the effort that speech cost her; nor did he know ever that her face was suffused when her horse, startled, sprang out of sight at the touch of her 159 spurs. He did not know, as he stood there, wishing that he had called her back, that she was riding recklessly down the road, hurt, and yet inclined to be strangely happy over that parting and all it had confessed. With a set face, as if a whole fabric of dreams had been wrenched from his life, the miner turned and walked slowly over the trail, worn by his own feet, which led him back to the Croix d’Or, and the struggle with the stubborn rock.
As he topped the hill he suddenly listened, and his steps quickened. From below a new sound had been added to the threnody of the hills; a new note, grumbling and roaring, insistent and strong. Its message was plain. The mill of the Cross was running again for the first time in years; and, even as he looked down on the red roof, the whistle in the engine-house gave a series of cheerful toots in salute of the fact.
Down on the flat in front of the long structure which held, in its batteries, almost two-score stamps, a tall figure came out, and looked around as if seeking him, and then, casting its eyes upward, beheld him, and lifted a battered hat and swung it overhead. It was Bill, rejoicing in his work.
A car of ore slid along the tramway, with the 160 carboy dangling one leg over the back end while steadying himself by the controller, as if he had been thus occupied for years. Dick tore his hat off, threw it in the air, and shouted, and raced down the hill. From now on it must be work; unless they met with great success––then––he dared not stop to think of what then.
He hastened on down to the mill and entered the door. Everything about it, from the dumping of the cars sixty feet above, the wrench of the crushers breaking the ore into smaller fragments, the clash of the screens as it came on down to the stamps, and their terrific “jiggety-jig-jig,” roared, throbbed, and trembled. Every timber in the structure seemed to keep pace with that resistless shaking as the tables slid to and fro, dripping from the water percolating at their heads, to distribute the fine silt of crushed, muddy ore evenly over the plates in the steady downward slant. Already the bright plates of copper, coated with quicksilver, were catching, retaining, amalgamating the gold.
“The venners need a little more slant, don’t you think?” bellowed his partner, with his hands cupped and held close against Dick’s ear in the effort to make himself heard in that pandemonium 161 where millmen worked the shift through without attempting to speak.
In the critical calculation of the professional miner, Dick forgot all other affairs, and leaned down to see the run of water. He nodded his head, beckoned to the mill boss, and by well-known signs indicated his wish. He scrambled above and studied the pulp, slipping it through his fingers and feeling its fineness, and speculating whether or not they would be troubled with any solution of lead that would render the milling difficult and slime the plates so that the gold would escape to go roistering down the creek with waste water. It did feel very slippery, and he was reassured. He was eager to get to the assay-house and make his first assay of “tailings,” refuse from the mill, to discover what percentage of gold they were saving, and, in parlance, “How she would run on mill test.”