“All right, Yank, we’ll fix it somehow,” I agreed. “Now if you’re all right, Johnny and I will just go and straighten out our camp things a little.”
We were now, it will be remembered, without horses. Don Gaspar had unpacked our few belongings before 263 departing. Johnny and I found a good camping place, then carried the stuff over on our backs. We cooked ourselves some food, lit pipes, and sat down to talk the situation over.
We got nowhere. As a matter of fact, we were both in the dead-water of reaction from hard, long-continued labour, and we could not bring ourselves to face with any enthusiasm the resuming of gold washing. Revulsion shook us at the mere thought of getting down in a hot, glaring ravine and moving heavy earth and rocks. Yet we had not made a fortune, nor much of a beginning at one, and neither of us was what is known as a quitter. We realized perfectly that we would go on gold mining.
“What we need is a recess,” Johnny ended, “and I move we take it. Just let’s camp here, and loaf for a few days or a week, and see how Yank gets along, and then we can go back to Porcupine.”
As though this decision lifted a great weight, we sat back on our shoulder blades with a sigh of relief, and blew tobacco smoke straight up in the air for at least fifteen minutes. By the end of that time we, being young and restless, felt thoroughly refreshed.
“Let’s go look this outfit over,” suggested Johnny.
We gravitated naturally to the diggings, which were very much like those at Hangman’s Gulch, except that they were rather more extensive, and branched out more into the tributary ravines. The men working there were, many of them, of a much better type than those we had seen in town; though even here was a large element of rough-looking, wild, reckless customers. We wandered 264 about here and there, our hands in our pockets, a vast leisure filling our souls. With some of the more pleasant-appearing miners we conversed. They told us that the diggings were rich, good “ounce a day” diggings. We saw a good many cradles in use. It was easy to tell the old-timers from the riffraff of newcomers. A great many of the latter seemed to lack the steadiness of purpose characteristic of nearly all the first rush. They worked haphazardly, spasmodically, pulling and hauling against each other. Some should not have been working at all, for their eyes were sunken in their heads from illness.
“We’ve got to hustle now,” they told us. “We can take a good rest when the rains stop work.”
We noticed especially a marked change in demeanour among some of the groups. In the early part of the summer every man answered every man good-naturedly, except he happened to have a next day’s head or some other sort of a personal grouch. Now many compact little groups of men worked quite apart. When addressed they merely scowled or looked sullen, evidently quite unwilling to fraternize with the chance-comer.
We loafed about here and there through the diggings, swapping remarks with the better disposed, until the men began to knock off work. Then we returned through the village.