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"Ez far ez I kin see, Slinn," he said, gravely, "the pint between you and me ain't to be settled by our children, or wot we allow is doo and right from them to us. Afore we preach at them for playing in the slumgullion, and gettin' themselves splashed, perhaps we mout ez well remember that that thar slumgullion comes from our own sluice-boxes, where we wash our gold.
They were cleaning up one string of sluice-boxes the first time I went to "15"; the water-gate in the ditch, into which a portion of the creek had been diverted, allowed only a gentle stream to flow through the huge boa-constrictor hose into the boxes and down over the riffles where the bronze-colored gold shone forth distinctly.
Instantly he scrambled to his feet and crouching, dodging among the boulders that strewed the river bank, he ran at top speed until he reached the sluice-boxes. The carpenter came out from his shop to take a leisurely survey of the world and Smaltz threw himself flat until he had turned inside again.
There are claims however in which the clay is so extremely tough that it will roll in large balls more than a quarter of a mile through a steep sluice with a large head of water, and come out at the lower end scarcely diminished in size. The gold is caught in the sluice-boxes by false bottoms of various kinds.
They always worked alone, and said they were developing the mine. No one had any idea that they were taking out much dust, until the mill and sluice-boxes were burned one night, and the story came out that they had been robbed of more than thirty thousand dollars. Each partner accused the other of the theft. Both were arrested, and detectives commenced to follow every clue.
"So did I," confessed Teddy, in a lower voice. "A glove," said Octavia, falling back as the enemy approached her ditches. "Caste," said Teddy, halting his firing line without loss. "I hobnobbed, half the evening with one of Hammersmith's miners, a fellow who kept his hands in his pockets, and talked like an archangel about reduction plants and drifts and levels and sluice-boxes."
His goal was always before him and this goal was represented by the hour when the machinery in the power and pump houses was running smoothly, when a head of water was flowing through the flume and sluice-boxes and the scrapers were handling 1000 cubic yards a day.
Day by day they would toil together, digging out the muck, emptying it into the sluice-boxes or testing it in the pan, without exchanging a word; then some trifling difficulty would arise, for which, perhaps, neither of them was responsible, and they would seize the opportunity to goad one another on to murder with the evil of what they said.
The day-gang on No. 0 was hard at it down there where lengthwise in the channel was propped a line of sluice-boxes, steadied by regularly spaced poles laid from box to bank on gravel ridge. Looking down from above, the whole was like a huge fish-bone lying along the bed of the creek.
The pay-dirt, in whichever way obtained, is then shovelled into the sluice-boxes, a series of long troughs, set at the proper angle to prevent the gold from washing past, or the dirt from settling to the bottom.
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