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"Get the woman out o' the way," said the owner; "there's goin' to be trouble with this fire-eating Southerner." The woman turned quickly. The Colonel, diving under the sluice-box for a plunge at Austin, came up face to face with her. "The lady," said the Colonel, catching his breath, shaking with rage, but pulling off his hat "the lady is quite safe, but I'm not so sure about you."
Toy fell among the rocks, sprawling backwards. He got to his feet and came back. Once more he clawed and clung and once more Smaltz knocked him down. A third time he returned. "You're harder to kill nor a cat," Smaltz grinned without malice, but he threw him violently against the sluice-box. Toy lost his balance, toppled, and went over backward, reaching out wildly to save himself as he fell.
Sprudell spoke so slowly and chose his words with such care that the company received the impression that this theory of placer deposit was his own and in spite of their personal prejudice their admiration grew. "As undoubtedly you know," continued Mr. Sprudell, tapping his glasses judicially upon the edge of the sluice-box, "the richest gold in all alluvial deposits "
The way he got it off caused general laughter. He endured for two weeks work which very few strong men can keep up, working on the ten-hour night shift shoveling frozen ground up and into a sluice-box; and then, pretty well used up, but with enough money to take him home, he departed for Nome, this time by way of the river, saying that he hoped to return next spring.
Placer-mining was a subject upon which Toy felt qualified to speak, since, after a cramped journey from Hong Kong, smuggled in his uncle's clothes hamper, he had started life in America at fourteen, carrying water to his countrymen placering in "Chiny" Gulch; after which he became one of a company who, with the industry of ants, built a trestle of green timber one hundred and fifty feet high to carry water to the Beaver Creek diggings and had had his reward when he had seen the sluice-box run yellow with gold and had taken his green rice bowl heaping full upon the days of division.
"What for you put your hand in de water for, papa?" queried Little Stumps, who had left off his work, which consisted mainly of pulling flowers and putting them in the sluice-box to see them float away. He was sitting by his father's side, and he looked up in his face as he spoke.
"Their works are gone," he said regretfully. "I'd say there's not a sluice-box nor a conduit left. Maybe even their tools are lost. Poor devils!" The man's calm words had their effect. Buck at once responded to the practical suggestion. "They don't leave their tools," he said. Then he pointed up at the lake. "Say, what if that had come down?
We thought it looked wonderful enough on the Big Chimney table but Lord! to see it like this, out o' doors, mixed with sunshine and water!" Still he stood there fascinated, leaning heavily against the sluice-box, still with his dripping hands full, when, after a hurried glance, the Colonel returned to his own box. None of the gang ever talked in the presence of the owner.
Improving, not in beauty, but economy, quite in the modern spirit, the Greeks themselves discovered that they lost less gold if they led the stream through fleece-lined water-troughs and beyond this device of those early placer-miners we have not progressed so far but that, in every long, narrow sluice-box in the world to-day, you may see a Lydian water-trough with a riffle in the bottom for a golden fleece.
It was only a second that he hung with his wild beseeching eyes on Smaltz's scared face while his frail, old body acted as a wedge for the racing water and the rocks. Then he let go and turned over and over tumbling grotesquely in the wide sluice-box while the rocks pounded and ground him, beat him into insensibility.
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