The treasure of Mushroom Rock

by Sidford F. Hamp

“You see,” said Jack, “the copper can’t stand against this powerful acid, whereas the gold doesn’t care a rap for it. Gold will hold its own against any single acid; you must make a mixture of two of them before you can dissolve ‘the royal metal,’ as it is called. So that question is settled. We have found gold, without doubt. The next thing to find is the place it came from.”

Until bedtime that evening we sat together in the sentry-box talking over our find and arranging the programme for the morrow, and next morning, Percy, whose turn it was to go on guard, went off up the gully,—wisely taking his dinner with him,—while I accompanied Jack down to the creek.

Above the Mushroom Rock the bed of the stream was cumbered with boulders fallen from the mountain, but in between them were many crevices and hollows containing more or less sand and small gravel. These little depositories we examined carefully, picking up the residue by means of the red clay, of which we had a good supply left over from the day before, but in none of them was there so much as a colour of gold. At length we had worked up close to the circular basin which the stream, falling from the cliff above, had worn in its hard stone bed, and there, just below the basin, we found a natural “riffle,” as Jack called it; a little ledge two inches high running across the stream, with an accumulation of sand on its upper side.

This sand Jack proceeded to clear out with his spoon, but as we had again used up our stock of clay, he sent me back to the old place to look for more. There was very little left, but I managed to collect a double handful, including a small amount of the white material which I scraped up with my knife, and carrying it back to the scene of operations I handed it over to my chief. This time we did find gold, a small amount, certainly, but enough to convince Jack of what he had suspected all along, namely, that the vein was somewhere upon the mountain above the wall.

“We shall have to make a ladder,” said he, “and set it up on top of the bank there in order to get up the wall; a ladder twenty feet long will do, I think. But before we do so we will test the soil on both banks of the creek to make sure that the gold did come from up-stream, and not from the mountain on either side.”

As we fully expected, our tests of the soil, and we made many of them, were unproductive; the vein, we felt certain, was somewhere on the mountain in which the stream had its source.

With that belief impressed upon our minds we turned to, forthwith, to build a ladder. Carrying a couple of long poles to the highest point of the bank, and setting them against the wall, we next cut into strips the elk-hide which had once served as a door to the cabin, and with the thongs bound cross-pieces to the uprights every two feet of their length, making by these means a rough but serviceable ladder.

Though by this time it was getting on towards sunset, we scrambled up to the top of the wall to make a brief survey of the country we proposed to prospect; and a tremendous task, it seemed to me, we had set ourselves. Dozens of gullies, big and little, wide and narrow, straight and crooked, led down to the creek, in any one of which, and in any part of any one of which, the vein might lie concealed; a vein perhaps no wider than one’s hand. It looked to me very much like a hopeless task. Jack, however, did not seem to be disconcerted by the outlook.

“We’ll begin to-morrow,” said he, “and take these gullies one at a time and search them thoroughly. It is my belief that the vein is composed of some soft material which washes away easily, and that we shall find it, when we do find it, in some deep crevice; for, as you will have noticed, all the gold we have washed out yet has been entirely free of any quartz or other rock, or of vein-matter of any kind—rather unfortunately, for we have no sample of the rock to go by. As it is, we shall have to bring down specimens of any veins we may find, grind them up between two stones, and wash them like any other gravel.”

“It seems to me, Jack,” said I, “that it might take us a year to go over all the country that drains into this creek; there is so much of it.”