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Fortunately the breakfast tailings proved abundant, and the dog went off to assist a friend of his in making sundry interesting smell analyses along the gate posts of the stockade. The Duel This was temporary relief, but left no suggestion of complete escape. He lay there till nearly noon suffering more and more from the cramped position and thirst, and utterly puzzled as to the next move.
Old diggers said that it was lovely to see how she'd spin up a heavy green-hide bucket full of clay and 'tailings', and land and empty it with a twist of her wrist. Most men were afraid of her, and few diggers' wives were strong-minded enough to seek a second row with Mother Middleton.
I have been a quartz miner in the silver regions a pretty hard life; I know all the palaver of that business: I know all about discovery claims and the subordinate claims; I know all about lodes, ledges, outcroppings, dips, spurs, angles, shafts, drifts, inclines, levels, tunnels, air-shafts, "horses," clay casings, granite casings; quartz mills and their batteries; arastras, and how to charge them with quicksilver and sulphate of copper; and how to clean them up, and how to reduce the resulting amalgam in the retorts, and how to cast the bullion into pigs; and finally I know how to screen tailings, and also how to hunt for something less robust to do, and find it.
I told Markham about the gold when he was here for bear. He is smart; but he don't know heverything. You think he can make it pay with that invention? I doubt, me. There is one place in those 'ills," and Bird came closer to Northwick, and dropped his voice, "where you don't 'ave to begin with the tailings. I know the place. But what's the good? All the same, you want capital."
There was no place for verdure on Diamond Gully; the whole field turned upside down, littered with the debris of the mines, washed with yellow slurry, and strewn in places with white boulders and the gravel tailings sluiced clean by the gold-seekers.
Also tailings pits should be made, in which the tailings and slimes are allowed to settle, and the cleared water is pumped back to be again used. These pits should, where practicable, be cemented.
But first of all, let me show you what I obtained the other day out of between 200 and 250 lbs. weight of those tailings." He rose, went into the second room, and returned with a small enamelled dish, and placed it upon the table. The miners rose and gathered round, and saw lying on the bottom about an ounce and a quarter of fine powdery gold.
The swish, swish, swish, of the wet dirt in the cradle-hoppers and the rattling of the tailings thrown from the shovels providing an unvarying substratum of sound.
It is placed ordinarily in the bed of a ravine or creek through which tailings run, and it receives no attention for weeks or months at a time, save to keep it from choking. The sluices emptying into it furnish both dirt and water, and in the dirt there is always a large amount of fine gold, as is plainly proved by the fact that some of the tail-sluices have paid large profits to their owners.
There, seamed and scarred by hydraulic engines, was the old hillside, over whose denuded surface the grass had begun to spring again in fitful patches; there were the abandoned heaps of tailings already blackened by sun and rain, and worn into mounds like ruins of masonry; there were the waterless ditches, like giant graves, and the pools of slumgullion, now dried into shining, glazed cement.
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