"Mebbe so. Want to buy this claim? She"s a humdinger."
"No. But I"ll buy your sluice. How"ll you sell it?"
"That sluice? Seventy-five dollars."
"Whew!"
"It"s forty feet long, of three boards; that means 120 feet, and lumber"s $300 a thousand feet and you have to put in your order a week ahead. With the props and the cleats and the nails there"s over $40 of material in that sluice, and I reckon the labor of hauling and building is wuth the balance."
"I"ll give you $50," snapped Harry.
"Sold. But hurry up. We can"t wait long here to sell a sluice. There"s too much doing "round the corner."
Harry fished out three gold pieces--two twenties and a ten--and pa.s.sed them over.
"Better take it off this property quick or somebody else will," advised the man; and away he and his partner strode, for the strike in Bobtail Gulch just across a little divide south.
"Lucky again!" jubilated Harry--who, Terry saw, had been smart. "Cost a lot of money, but we couldn"t have made it much cheaper ourselves and we"d have been held up waiting for boards. You sit on it while I go for Jenny. We haul the whole thing at once."
"Maybe we could have got it for nothing, after they"d left," proposed Terry, with an eye to the general grab-all as various persons swarmed over the abandoned claims.
"It wasn"t ours, was it?" retorted Harry. "But it is now." And he left at a fast limp.
He returned with Jenny, harnessed, and they triumphantly dragged away the sluice, carrying also the scissors props on which it had rested. Its joints indeed threatened to part, but by picking their path they arrived with it intact at the Golden Prize.
Their preacher neighbor greeted them with a wave of hand and came over to inspect.
"Looks as though you were going right into business," he a.s.serted. "I thought maybe you"d join the rush for Bobtail."
"No, sir; we stick," a.s.sured Harry. "A bird in the hand"s worth two in the bush."
"Well, depends on the bird," answered the preacher. "Now, my bird"s an old crow, I"m afraid, and if I could see a fat turkey in the bush I"d drop my crow pretty quick, like those other fellows."
After dinner Harry rather ruefully examined his money belt. It was flat and limp.
"Ten dollars left," he said.
"And our dust, you know," reminded Terry. "We"ve the five dollars we washed out, and we can wash out more whenever we want it."
Harry brightened.
"That"s right. We"re rich. You can try panning again, this afternoon, and I"ll go down to the grocery and lay in provisions and any other stuff we"ll need, and then we can set up the sluice and pile up the gold. Get to have everything running before Father Richards and that George Stanton come in."
"We can buy a claim for them, too," proposed Terry. "Or find one that"s been left."
"No crows," corrected Harry. "Turkeys only."
Terry went at his panning with enthusiasm, bound to make a showing.
Panning was slow, but it was rather exciting because there always was liable to be something yellow right under your eye, if you looked close enough. Panning was a one-man job; you did it all yourself.
The preacher strolled over to watch.
"How"s the dirt paying now?" he queried.
"Pretty good. I"ve found _some_ more," truthfully answered Terry. "About a dollar"s worth, I guess."
"A pinch, eh? How"d you like to take over my claim?"
"Haven"t any money yet. I mean, we won"t have money till we get the sluice to going."
"I"ll tell you what I"ll do," proffered the preacher. "Just to make the transaction binding, I"ll sell you the claim for your next pan.
Preaching is my business, not mining, you see. If you buy my claim, then n.o.body can accuse you of jumping it."
"All right," accepted Terry.
"Play fair, now," laughed the professor. "Take your dirt from a good rich spot."
Spots looked mainly all alike to Terry. The hole where he had been digging was laying bare the hard rock, but he sc.r.a.ped up a quant.i.ty of dirt and loose splinters from a crevice----
"You"re giving me princ.i.p.ally rock, aren"t you?" criticized the preacher, good-naturedly. "But let it go. I"ll be game."
However, as the pan cleared and Terry threw aside the splinters, they both exclaimed. Yellow was plainly visible--and moreover there was a blackish, cindery fragment the size of a crushed hazel-nut that glinted and weighed suspiciously as Terry lingered in the act of tossing it away also.
"Here! Hold on!" And the preacher took it. "Nugget, isn"t it? Fifteen or twenty dollars, I"ll wager--and ten dollars more in flakes!"
"That"s a rich pan, boys, as I reckon," interrupted a voice, accompanied by crunching footsteps and a growl from Shep.
The speaker was a miner over six feet tall and broad in proportion--a veritable giant of a man, in clothes as rough as the roughest, and with a revolver at his belt. In his black-whiskered face his eyes were small and deep-set, and close together, or as close as an enormous nose would permit. He was carrying a sack on his shoulder, which he deposited in order to investigate the pan.
"Yes, sir-ee. A $40 pan, countin" the nugget. Does all your dirt run like that?"
"No, sir; not yet," replied Terry. "But maybe it will when we sluice it."
"Goin" to sluice, are you?" The giant"s close-set little eyes roved about inquisitively. "This your claim, is it?"
"Yes, sir. This and the next one."
"Where"d you get that lucky pan o" dirt?"
"From that hole."
The giant strode up, carelessly poked about in the hole with his boot-toe, filtered some of the dirt through his fingers.
"You"re down to bed-rock already," he p.r.o.nounced, returning. "I calkilate you may have struck a leetle pocket, but I don"t count much on these shallow slopes. Some gold ketches, most of it"s washed down. He your partner?" and he indicated the preacher.
"No, sir. My partner"s down to the store."
"Older"n you?"