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"I don't know what is the matter with me," said Darrell, as he seated himself at a table, facing Whitcomb. "My head seems to have a small-sized stamp-mill inside of it; every bone in my body aches, and my joints feel as though they were being pulled apart." Whitcomb looked up quickly. "Are you just from the East, or have you been out here any time?" "I stopped for a few days, back here a ways."
I didn't take an awful sight of notice about Joe until I came in, one night, and the boys told me that Joe was arrested as an accomplice in the robbery of the Black Prince mine, in Constitution gulch. This Black Prince was a gold placer owned by two middle-aged Englishmen. They had a small stamp-mill, run by mule power; and a large number of sluice-boxes.
A toy Baldwin locomotive dragged the ore trains around the hill to the noisy stamp-mill spreading through another valley, with a village of adobe huts overgrown with masses of purple flowers and at the bottom a plain of white sand waste from which the "values" had been extracted. The last samples I had taken assayed nine pounds of silver and 23 grams of gold to the ton.
An old stamp-mill, closed for the time, but in charge of three men who were making preparations to resume work, was passed the next day. They had telephone communication with Searchlight, Nevada, twenty odd miles away, and we sent out some telegrams in that way. More sand-bars were encountered the next day, and ranches began to appear on both sides of the river.
The Lost Dog consisted quite simply of a hole in the ground guarded by an excellent five stamp-mill. The latter's existence could only be explained by the incurable optimism of Barney Fallan certainly not by the contents of the hole in the ground.
But when the snows came and winter set in, he dared not take the long tramps, but hugged the fire at his boarding-house, read his little Testament, and tried in vain to find one spot out of hearing of the noise of tramping feet, the roar of the stamp-mill, and the hoarse laughter and rude stories and language of the men ever coming and going.
Joe ran awhile on the road again and then took a job as chief-engineer of a big stamp-mill in Arizona, and going there he was lost to myself and the men on the road, and finally the Black Prince robbery passed into history, and nothing remained but the tradition, a sort of a myth of the mountains, like Captain Kidd's treasures, the amount only being increased by time.
A pandemonium of sound was robbing the night of peace through music, of assorted character, which boiled forth from open doors in discordant business rivalry, but underneath it all was the steady, dull monotone of the stamp-mill, remorselessly beating the ore as if in eternal industry. "Hardly know the place now, eh?" Bill said, as they entered the open doors of the High Light.
In a Western camp one miner put his lower brain into the pickaxe and earned $2.00 a day; another miner put his higher brain into the stamp-mill and soon was receiving a score of dollars daily for his work; a third youth, toiling in the same mine, put his genius into an electric process for extracting ore, and sold his invention for a fortune.
If the quartz was very rich in gold, it was pounded and ground fine in a hand mortar. Then the lighter quartz was washed away and the gold left. The miners also made use of the Mexican arastra. This is a very crude apparatus, and is employed even now by miners who cannot afford to procure a stamp-mill.
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