“Then that nugget I found this morning,” said Percy, “tumbled into the water when the rock fell down.”
“Yes,” replied Jack. “And the water had not had time to wash it quite clean. It was the little scrap of clay left sticking to it that showed me where it came from.”
“I suppose this white streak probably runs across the other rocks as well,” said I.
“Probably. We’ll soon see.”
The three rocks lay close together, and being all about the same height there was no difficulty in stepping from one to the other. Each of them was traversed by the same white line, which, like the first one, showed scraps of gold in various places; one scrap, which I picked out with my knife, being as big as the top of my thumb.
At last, then, we had found that elusive gold-vein; a small one, indeed, but to all appearance a rich one; and having found it, we determined to make the most of it.
That day, and the next three days as well, we spent upon the top of the rock exposed to the full blast of the wintry wind—for the winter now seemed to have set in in earnest,—each with a sheath-knife cutting a trench along the line of the white streak, and carefully saving every scrap of the frozen clay thus laboriously collected. By the time the work was finished, we had accumulated some five hundred pounds of the precious stuff, which we carried to the cabin and there proceeded to wash, a double handful at a time, in the gold-pan; a slow and tedious undertaking.
Our reason for doing this work in the house was that the little creek had ceased to flow, being now frozen solid, and we were obliged in consequence to resort to melted snow for washing and drinking purposes. The iron pot was kept continuously upon the fire, and one of us was constantly engaged in bringing in shovels full of snow with which to feed it, in order to supply Jack’s insatiable demands for more water.
In the corner of the house we dug a hole two feet deep to serve as a sink, and in this corner sat Jack, hour after hour, with his feet planted on either side of the hole, washing “dirt” in the pan, pouring away the muddy water into the sink, and saving the precious residue of gold and black sand.
By the time all of the original five hundred pounds of clay had been washed, we found ourselves in possession of about a tenth of that amount of black sand, which was then all washed over again with the greatest care. At last Jack declared that he was afraid to wash it any more, for fear of losing some of the fine particles of gold; so our labour was concluded when the mass had been reduced to about thirty pounds’ weight, of which two-thirds, perhaps, was gold.