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He took out his knife and scraped the roof in places, and brought to light in detached pieces a layer of gold-dust about the substance of a sheet of blotting-paper and full three yards wide; it crossed the subterranean at right angles, dipping apparently about an inch in two yards. The conduct of brutus and co. had been typical.
He handed the spoon to the old man, who felt of the bowl. "It is dry," he said; "nothing will stick to it." Hassan plunged the spoon into the bag and brought it out, filled with gold-dust, which he poured into the empty pan. The scales rose, fell, trembled, and then settled even. "I nearly always can judge an ounce," said Hassan; "a grain is another matter." He weighed out sixteen ounces.
Afar, bare blue steeps were pink in their chasms, brown on their spurs. The dark yellow fields were as if thick with gold-dust; the pale mustard was a waving yellow sea. Not a tree marred the smooth hills. The earth sent forth a perfume of its own. Below the plateau from which rose the white walls of the mission was a wide field of bright green corn rising against the blue sky.
So Robinson took with him toys, and beads, and other things, to sell to the natives in Africa, and he got there, in exchange for these things, so much gold-dust that he thought he was soon going in that way to make his fortune. And therefore he went on a second voyage.
"Lor!" gasped Janie, staring before her at the autumn tints that were powdering the dingy elms with gold-dust. There was mingled pride and perplexity in her tones; slowly she savoured the romantic moment to the full, turning it over in her mind as the bull's-eye revolved in her cheek, before finally putting it from her. Then: "I couldn't marry you," she said gently. "You ain't got no prospecks."
"Then, when word spreads around the country and such news always travels like lightning every gambler and bunco man in Wyoming and Colorado will be seen camping on Top Notch Trail, each trying in his own way to wheedle money or gold-dust from the unwary ones," laughed Mr. Brewster. "There now, Daddy! You've laughed, so I know your spell of worry is over with.
No doubt a successful quack-doctor had used it in his prosperous days for his wife and progeny; no doubt it had subsequently become the property of a second-class undertaker, and had conveyed many a quartette of cheap clergymen to the funerals of poor relations whose leaking sands of life left no gold-dust behind. Such was our carriage for a rainy day.
They seated themselves, and the princess related the plan she had formed in the plain where they were encamped the last time they were together, as soon as she perceived she waited for him to no purpose; how she went through with it till she arrived at the isle of Ebene, where she had been obliged to marry the princess Haiatalnefous, and accept of the crown, which king Armanos offered her as a condition of the marriage: how the princess, whose merit she highly extolled, had obliged her to make declaration of her sex: and how she found the talisman in the pots of olives mingled with the gold-dust, which she had bought, and how this circumstance had proved the cause of her sending for him from the city of the idolaters.
What has happened?" and Mr. Conroyal, who was in the lead, stopped suddenly and stared in astonishment at the woe-begone faces of the erstwhile happy couple. "Robbed," Dickson answered sententiously. "Robbed and the mine has played out." "Yes, robbed of all but about fifty dollars' worth of gold-dust that we took out this afternoon before the mine gave out," and Mrs. Dickson's voice trembled.
He scamped, too, his six-months' attempt at digging he had been no more fit for the work than a child. Worn to skin and bone, his small remaining strength sucked out by dysentery, he had in the end bartered his last pinch of gold-dust for a barrow-load of useful odds and ends; and this had formed the nucleus of his store.
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