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Important as the power-house was it was only a small portion of the whole. There was still the 10-inch pump in the pump-house with its 75 horse-power motor and the donkey engine with the 50 horse-power motor to get to working right, not to mention the flume and sluice-boxes, with their variety of riffles and every practicable device for trapping the elusive fine gold.
When the mound got the proper height the sluice was simply lengthened, like putting another joint onto a caterpillar and there you were! The sluice-boxes have long since been moved away or rotted to mould but the little mounds remain, to be mansions for hustling colonies of small black ants.
While Bruce was expecting to catch the greater part of it in the first six sluice-boxes he was not taking a single chance.
Carmack inquired when they strolled back into camp. "To hell with pups!" was Hootchinoo Bill's reply. "Me and Kink's goin' a-lookin' for Too Much Gold when we get rested up." Too Much Gold was the fabled creek of which all sour doughs dreamed, whereof it was said the gold was so thick that, in order to wash it, gravel must first be shovelled into the sluice-boxes.
Men who put themselves within a strong barbed-wire fence, and remember Hammersmith balls only by the talk of miners about sluice-boxes, should not be allowed to possess such articles. After all, what a paradise this prairie country was! How it blossomed like the rose when you found things that were thought to be lost!
But in spite of the time lost the cut was deepening and the side walls stood up so that every scraper that emptied into the sluice-boxes was from the pay-streak. Bruce fairly gloated over each cubic yard that he succeeded in getting in, for the sample pans showed that it was all he had hoped for, and more. If only the riffles were saving it and the tables catching the fine gold!
"'Nobody can't look into the ground, says I. 'I don't mind losin' out myself, for I've done it for twenty years and I sort of like it now, but I'm sorry for the girl. "'It means another whole season, he says. 'I wanted to see them this summer, or bring them in next fall. "'Sufferin' sluice-boxes! Are you plumb daffy? Bring a woman into the Yukon and a little baby. "'She'd follow me anywhere.
And about two-thirds of those sluice-boxes, the bottoms fitted with riffles, were finished. Afterwards, at that camp where he stopped for dogs, I learned that aside from a few days at long intervals, when the two miners had exchanged their labor for some engineering, he had made his improvements alone, single-handed.
During short intervals of pumping, Bruce had been able by ground-sluicing to work off a considerable area of top soil and now that the machinery was declared to be ready for a steady run he could set the scrapers at once in the red gravel streak that contained the "pay." The final preparation before starting was to pour the mercury behind the riffles in the sluice-boxes.
"And when God Almighty washes Daylight's soul out on the last big slucin' day," MacDonald interrupted, "why, God Almighty'll have to shovel gravel along with him into the sluice-boxes." "Dot iss goot," Olaf Henderson muttered, regarding the gambler with profound admiration. "Ver' good," affirmed French Louis. "I t'ink we take a drink on dat one time, eh?"
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