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It's a pity that old mossback had to put in a mill. The water was slack enough before, but now there seems to be no current at all." "Case of wait for the wind," agreed Tom North. "Old Daly will be red-headed. He must be about out of logs at the mill. The flood-water's going down every minute, and it'll make the riffles above Redding a holy fright.
He stood on the topmost platform, and his gaze ran down the length of the structure. "A sluice-box and conduit," he muttered. Then in a tone of deep appreciation: "Gee, and it's fixed good!" He bent down over the sluice-box, and groped with his hands over the bottom of it. There was a trickle of water flowing gently in its depths. He searched with his fingers along the riffles.
They held a surprising amount of sediment, because the stream that had emerged from the crack in the sluices had carried with it pebbles, sand, and all the concentration of the riffles at this point. Standing directly beneath the cataract, most of it had dived fairly into his inviting waistband, following down the lines of least resistance into his boot-legs and boiling out at the knees.
One would not suppose that atoms of gold and silver would float on top of six inches of water, but they did; and in order to catch them, coarse blankets were laid in the troughs, and little obstructing "riffles" charged with quicksilver were placed here and there across the troughs also.
Already he commands ten miles of water swift, clear water running over stone, through a freshet bed so many hundreds of feet wide that he has forgotten what it means to guard his back cast. It is to be waded in the riffles, so that he can cross from one shore to the other as the mood suits him.
Some of the laws that we wrote have already, in front of our eyes, taken on the flesh of achievement. Medicare that we were unable to pass for so many years is now a part of American life. Voting rights and the voting booth that we debated so long back in the riffles, and the doors to public service, are open at last to all Americans regardless of their color.
"You expect to give him a daily dose of three drops on a lump of sugar, Letitia?" asked Harriet, as she exchanged glances with Jessie. One evening last week Jessie and Harriet had motored Cliff in from the Club just in time to save him from going over the riffles and Letitia had been dancing with him without noticing his staggers.
The machine is fixed in a gently sloping position, at an angle determined by circumstances; the wash-dirt is lifted into the upper end by manual labour; when stiff it must be stirred or shovelled, and a stream of water does the rest. The greater gravity of the gold causes it to be arrested by the riffles. Instead of the bars grooves may be cut and filled with quicksilver.
He cut a willow pole, stood back and cast out his gay bit of bait, letting it drift with the riffles. There came a quick tug, another, sharp and vigorous, and he swung his prize out of the water, breaking the surface into scattering jewels, flashing in the sunlight as it struck against the grass along the creek's edge. Dusk gathered while he worked over his fire.
Across the bottom of all this flume, at every yard or less of its length, small wooden cleats had been nailed, to form the "riffles." Into the hoses the water from the creek was turned, at the top. The men then shoveled the sand in the running stream and away it went, sluicing along the water-chute, its particles rattling down the wooden stairway noisily.
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