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Updated: August 26, 2024
In the course of ten minutes part of the layer of surface-earth was removed, revealing the bluish-clay soil in which gold was usually found; the pan was filled with this "pay-dirt," as it was called, in contradistinction to the "surface-dirt," which didn't "pay," and was taken down to the stream, where Larry washed it out under the eye of McLeod; but he did it clumsily, as might be expected, and lost a considerable amount of valuable material.
Finally the reason came out. "I'm a college man," he explained proudly. "So was my partner same class. But one can't always remain in the admirable East, and three years ago he and I came here prospecting. Actually struck some pay-dirt in the hills yonder, too, but it sort of petered out on us." "Oh, I'm sorry." Miss Donovan's condolence was genuine. "We lost the ore streak.
"I am that, an' first thing when I get my pay," was the reply. "Reminds me, I owe for this suit I'm wearin'. I'll drop in an' settle." A group of spikers held forth on a little bank above the railroad track, at a point where a few weeks before they had fastened those very rails with lusty blows. "Well, boys, I think I see the smoke of our pay-dirt, way down the line," said one.
Occasionally some sanguine operator will push his well down through fifty feet of solid rock at a great outlay, and with vast labor, to find himself possessed of the means for a large fortune, while another will find himself ruined by his failure to strike the expected gold. When the pay-dirt is reached, its depth and the number of zolotniks of gold in every pood taken out are ascertained.
Mining-tunnels are usually nearly horizontal those entering hill-sides having a slight ascent, for the double purpose of draining the mine, and to facilitate the removal of the pay-dirt.
A slow current does not dissolve tough clay, and that is the greater part of the pay-dirt, so rapidly as a swift one. The shorter the sluice, other things being equal, the smaller the grade should be. There is more danger that the fine particles of gold will be lost by a short sluice than by a longer one, and to diminish this danger, the rapidity of the current must be reduced by a small grade.
The process is very similar to the ancient method of separating grain from chaff. The miner who devotes himself to dry washing must be very particular to take only rich dirt, so he scrapes the bed-rock carefully. He never digs very deep not more than twenty feet; and when he goes beyond seven or eight feet he "coyotes," or burrows after the pay-dirt.
We were good comrades then, and did not calculate what ruin the avarice of gain may bring about in men. "When spring came, we set out to seek the gold which should redeem us, which lay just underground. All that summer we travelled and found only pay-dirt or colours, and at times not even that, till we came to the Sleeping River and pitched our camp at what was afterwards Drunkman's Shallows.
In some sluices, where the pay-dirt contains much coarse gold, the quicksilver is introduced from thirty to sixty yards below the head, so as to catch only the fine particles of metal. Cleaning up. The separation of the gold, amalgam, and quicksilver, from the dirt in the bottom of the sluice, is called "cleaning up;" and the period between one "cleaning up" and another is called a "run."
Tennyson is a man of talent, who happened to strike a lucky vein, which he has worked with cleverness. The adventurer with a pickaxe in Washoe may happen upon like good fortune. The world is full of poetry as the earth is of "pay-dirt;" one only needs to know how to "strike" it. An able man can make himself almost anything that he will.
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