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Updated: May 25, 2025
The face and the talk of Jack Evans brought irresistibly to mind the mountain trail and the prospector's pack-mule, the smoke of camp-fires and the odour of bacon and beans. Seventeen long years the man had tramped in deserts and mountain wildernesses, and Nature had graven her impress deep into his body and soul.
Rifle in hand, and on foot, he slipped around in the woods, as a hunter might have, to stalk drinking deer. There were no smoke, no noise, no horses anywhere round the cabin, and after watching awhile Wade went forward to look at it. It was an old ramshackle hunter's or prospector's cabin, with dirt floor, a crumbling fireplace and chimney, and a bed platform made of boughs.
Inflammatory rheumatism, with a complication of pneumonia; in itself not necessarily fatal, or even dangerous, but with a man of the Old Prospector's age and habits of life this complication might any moment become serious. He left some medicine, ordered nourishing food, perfect rest and quiet, and was about to depart. "How soon shall I be up, doctor?" enquired the Old Prospector.
Yet enough had been seen in the earlier days to foment rumor, and many wonderful stories were told in the hunter's cabin and the prospector's camp stories of parties entering the gorge in boats and being carried down with fearful velocity into whirlpools where all were overwhelmed in the abyss of waters, and stories of underground passages for the great river into which boats had passed never to be seen again.
There was something about Virginia's piece of "barren quartz" that had appealed to his prospector's eye and even in the excitement of meeting the Widow he had not forgotten to sequester it. But a piece of rock from a girl's case of specimens is a far call from "ore in place" and he had come back that night to look the mine over and collect an average sample from the dump.
Whatever the reason, the fact remains that in the heat of the summer we were ploughing our way through salt-bogs, without water or any immediate prospect of getting any, and realised, not for the first time, that the prospector's life in West Australia is not "all beer and skittles."
Denver knocked off some samples with his prospector's pick and carried them out into the sun. "Why don't you work this?" he asked as he caught the gleam of native silver in the duller gray of the lead and Old Bunk hunched his shoulders. "Little out of my line," he suggested mildly, "I leave all that to the Swedes.
Moreover, he appeared to want to find gold for Cameron, not for himself. Cameron's hands always trembled at the turning of rock that promised gold; he had enough of the prospector's passion for fortune to thrill at the chance of a strike. But the other never showed the least trace of excitement. One night they were encamped at the head of a canyon.
He developed in a marvellous degree the prospector's instinct, for instinct it appeared to be; and many of the important prospects, and some of the most valuable mines in Southern British Columbia, had been discovered by him. It was at this point that Carroll took a hand.
Fortune once again favored me by the slightest of margins, for when I opened the door in the prospector's outer jacket I saw that we had missed coming up through the bottom of an ocean by but a few hundred yards.
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