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Just after sundown, however, they saw by the fires up the hills quite a little colony of gold-washers, which they moved towards; and, after purchasing some provisions at a store recently opened there, for which they paid a most exorbitant price, they securely tethered their horses to stakes they had driven in the ground, and encamped for the night.
In his name they had governed his tribe, and ransacked his dominions in search of the treasures collected by the gold-washers, and had even interfered in the religious worship of a superstitious people, and murdered, in cold blood, a party of their chiefs celebrating an Indian feast.
Oftener, the great magazine of accumulated gold and silver, which he never found time to enjoy, is rifled by others at his death. He was the toiler and the accumulator the slave who only produced. Miners, pearl-divers, gold-washers are we, my friend; but what we gather we fail to possess in that true sense of possession which involves delight and satisfaction.
You pull the string, and find that it wakes up half a dozen Departments, and finally communicates, say, with a friend of yours in the Telegraph, who once wrote some notes on the customs of the gold-washers when he was on construction-work in their part of the Empire. He may or may not be pleased at being ordered to write out everything he knows for your benefit. This depends on his temperament.
I stayed with Malcolm throughout the next few days, and spent a good part of my time out of doors among the gold-washers, but still I felt no inclination to take part in their labours. Fever was very prevalent, and I found that more than two-thirds of the people at this settlement were unable to move out of their tents. The other third were too selfish to render them any assistance.
There are some who have done better, even to 4000 dollars in a month; many 1000 dollars during the summer; and others, who refused to join a company of gold-washers who had a cheap-made machine, and receive one ounce per day, that returned to the settlement with not a vest pocket-full of gold.
The gold-washers sprang to their feet, each instinctively grasping for his weapon, but alack, neither was armed! The pan had come to seem the most potent of accoutrements, with which, in good sooth, one might take the world by storm, and the rifle and knife were forgotten, in their absorption.
And suddenly the two gold-washers in the depths of the grotto became conscious that they were not alone. There, sitting like stone figures one on each side of the narrow portal, were the two cheera-taghe of the town, silent, motionless, watching with eyes how long alert, listening with ears how discerningly attentive, it is impossible to divine.
On the following morning I returned to Longos; which consists of only a few miserable huts inhabited by gold-washers, who go about almost naked, probably because they are laboring during the greater part of the day in the water; but they are also very poor. The workmen make holes in the ground two and one-half feet long, two and one-half broad, and to thirty feet deep.
By way of precaution, however, almost every one slept with their bag of gold underneath their pillow, having a rifle or revolver within their reach. That same night I reached the camp of gold-washers, where Lacosse and the trapper had had their horses and packs of provisions stolen from them.
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