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The pulp is now washed with clean water, which leaches all the gold and silver out, and leaves the tailings ready for discharge, either in cars or sluiced away by water, if it is plentiful. "The chemical reaction of cyanide of potassium with gold is as follows, according to Elsner: 2Au + 4KCy + O + H2O = 2KAuCy2 + 2KHO. "That is, a double cyanide of gold and potassium is formed.
During many years of practical experience I have never known a single instance where a lode, on being worked, gave a return according to assay, and I have never known any mine where some of the precious metals could not be found in the tailings or slag.
I don't want nothing to work up the tailings of my mine, me! There is gold enough there to pay, and I can hire those habitans cheap, like dirt. What is their time worth? The bush is cut away: they got nothing to do. It is the time of a setting 'en, as you Americans say, their time."
"But," said the unsophisticated host, "won't the boys think I'm playing it rather low down on them, so to speak, givin' 'em a kind o' second table, as ef it was the tailings after a strike?" "Nonsense," said Mrs. Price, with decision. "It's quite fashionable in San Francisco, and just the thing to do." To this decision Spindler, in his blind faith in the widow's management, weakly yielded.
I have only to bid farewell to See Yup, and close this reminiscence of a misunderstood man, by adding the opinion of an eminent jurist in San Francisco, to whom the facts were submitted: "So clever was this alleged fraud, that it is extremely doubtful if an action would lie against See Yup in the premises, there being no legal evidence of the 'salting, and none whatever of his actual allegation that the gold-dust was the ORDINARY yield of the tailings, that implication resting entirely with the committee who examined it under false pretense, and who subsequently forced the sale by intimidation."
He told how the "tailings" at Mukton City had panned out 30 per cent, to the ton with two hundred thousand tons in the dump thrown away until the new smelter was started and they could get rid of the sulphides; of what Aetna Cobb's Crest had done and Beals Hollow and Morgan Creek all on the same ridge, and was about launching out on the future value of Mukton Lode when Mason broke the silence by asking if any one present had heard of a mine somewhere in Nevada which an Englishman had bought and which had panned out $1,200 to the ton the first week and not a cent to the square mile ever afterward?
In 1900 new machinery was put in and new methods were adopted, such as treating the tailings with cyanide and so saving much of the precious metal from them. From the beginning the Comstock mines have been so ready to follow improved methods that they have been called the mining school of the world. Great quantities of silver are used for making jewelry and for tableware.
Some would have called his bunch the scrubs and tailings of the Circle K ranch. Hartigan knew that; but he also knew that it must contain some unbroken horses and he asked to see them. There were ten, and of these he selected the biggest. A man of his weight must have a better mount than a pony. So the tall, rawboned, black three-year-old was roped and handed over to the Preacher.
The solution is made up to its former strength and passed again through fresh tailings. When the tailings contain a quantity of decomposed pyrites, partly oxidised, the acidity caused by the freed sulphuric acid requires to be neutralised by an alkali, caustic soda being usually employed. When "cleaning up," the cyanide solution in the zinc precipitating boxes is replaced by clean water.
She stooped and took up a handful of something that certainly looked like sand. The others did the same. "What do you call that?" they all asked, as they sifted it through their fingers. Nate smiled in a superior way. "Well, I don't call it sand, because it isn't sand. I thought it was when I first saw it; I got cheated, same as you. But there's no sand to it; it's just tailings."
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