Jasper County Democrat, Volume 19, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 September 1916 — GOLD [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

GOLD

By STEWART EDWARD WHITE

SYNOPSIS Talbot Ward’s challenge to Frink Munroe to a personal encounter to determine whether Munroe Is fit to make a trip to California in search of gold Is accepted. Munroe gets a hammerlock on Ward and wins the bout. Arriving at Chagres, Talbot Ward’s knowledge of Spanish and his firm treatment of the native boatmen help wonderfully. The party enters a tropical forest They reach Gatun, and, after passing through several villages where Ward always diplomatically handles the natives, they arrive in Panama. Ward forces steamship agent to refund passage money because ship Isn’t available. Yank has provided accommodations for all on board a sailing ship. They arrive In San Francisco.. Ward puts it up to each man to get $220 in one day. Munroe makes $25 as a laborer. Johnny gambles and gets $220. Ward astounds the party by telling how, by shrewd business deals in one day In the Golden City, he accumulated several thousand dollars.

CHAPTER XII. The Gold Trail. WE came upon the diggings quite suddenly. The trail ran around the corner of a hill, and there they were below us! In the wide, dry stream bottom perhaps fifty men were working busily, like a lot of ants. Some were picking away at the surface of the ground; others had dug themselves down waist deep and stooped and rose like legless bodies. Others had disappeared below ground and showed occasionally only as shovel blades. From so far above the scene was very lively and animated, for each was working like a beaver, and the red shirts made gay little spots of color. .On the hillside clung a few white tents and log cabins, but the main town itself we -later, discovered, as well as the larger diggings, lay around the bend and upstream. We looked all about us for some path leading down to the river, but could find none. So perforce we had to continue on along the trail. Thus we entered the camp of Hangman’s Gulch, for if it had been otherwise I am sure : we would have located promptly where we had seen those red shirted men. We wandered about here and there, looking with all our eyes. The miners were very busy and silent, but quite friendly, and allowed us to examine as much as we pleased the results of their operations. In the pots and cradles the yellow flake gold glittered

plainly, contrasting wjth the black eand. In the pans, however, the residue spread out fan shaped along the angle between the bottom and the side, and at the apex the gold lay heavy and beautiful all by itself. The men were generally bearded, tanned with working in this blinding sun and plastered liberally with the red earth. Wo saw some queer sights, however, as when we came across a jolly pair dressed In what were the remains of ultra fashionable garments up to and Including plug hats! At one side, work-. Ing some distance from the stream, were small groups of native Californians or Mexicans. They did not trouble to carry the earth all the way to the river, buL after screening it roughly, tossed it into the air above a canvas, thus winnowing out the heavier pay dirt. I thought this must be very disagreeable. ' As we wandered about here and there among all these men so busily engaged and with oiir own eyes saw pan after pan show gold, actual metallic guaranteed gold, such as rings and •watches and money are made of, a growing excitement possessed us—the excitement of a small boy with a new and untried gun. We wanted to get at It ourselves. Only we did not know how. Finally Yank approached one of the busy miners. "Stranger,” said he, “we’re new to this. Maybe you can tell us where we can dig a little of this gold ourselves.” The man straightened his back to ex-

Mbit a roving humorous blue eye, vmn which he examined Yank from top to toe. “If," said he, “It wasn’t for that eighteen foot cannon you carry over your left arm and a cold gray pair of eyes you carry in your head I’d direct you up the sidehill yonder and watch you sweat. As It is, you can work anywhere anybody else isn’t working. Start Inf “Can we dig right next to you, theni? asked Yank, nodding at an unbroken piece of ground Just upstream. The miner clambered carefully out of his waist deep trench, searched his pockets, produced a pipe and tobacco. After lighting this he made Yank a low bow. “Thanks for the compliment; but, I warn you, this claim of mine is not very rich.' I’m thinking of trying somewhere else.” “Don’t you get any gold?” “Oh, a few ounces a day.” “That suits me for a beginning,” said Yank decidedly. “Come on, boys!” The miner hopped back into his hole, only to stick his head out again for the purpose of telling us: “Mind you keep fifteen feet away!” With eager hands we slipped a pick and shovels from beneath the pack ropes, undid our iron bucket and without further delay commenced feverishly to dig. Johnny held the pall, while Yank and I vied with each other in being the first to get our shovelfuls into that receptacle. As a consequence we nearly swamped the pail first off and had to pour some of the earth out again. Then we all three ran down to the river and took turns stirring that mud pie beneath the gently flowing waters in the manner of rhe “pot panners" we had first watched. After a good deal of trouble we found ourselves possessed of a thick layer of rocks and coarse pebbles. “We forgot to screen it,” I pointed out. “We haven’t any screen,” said Johnny. “Let’s pick ’em out by hand,” suggested Yank. We did so. The process emptied the pail. Each of us insisted on examining closely, but none ts us succeeded in creating out of our desires any of that alluring black sand. “I suppose we .can’t expect to get color every time,” observed Johnny disappointedly. “Let’s tty her again.” We tried her again, and yet again and then some more, but always with the same result. Our hands became puffed and wrinkled with constant immersion in the water and began to feel sore from the continual stirring of the rubble. “Something wrong,” grunted Johnny into the abysmal silence in which we had been carrying on our work. “We can’t expect it every time,” I reminded hm. “All the others seem to.” “Well, maybe we’ve struck a blank place. Let’s try somewhere else,” suggested Yank. Johnny went over to speak to our neighbor, who was engaged in tossing out shovelfuls of earth from an excavation into which he had nearly disappeared. At Johnny’s hail he straightened his back, so that his head bobbed out of the hole like a prairie/dog. “No, It doesn’t matter where you dig,” he answered Johnny’s question. “The pay dirt is everywhere.” So we moved on a few hundred feet, picked another unoccupied patch and resumed our efforts. No greater success rewarded us here. “I believe maybe we ought to go deeper,” surmised Yank. “Some of these fellows are taking their dirt right off top of the ground,” objected Johnny. However, we unlimbered the pickax and went deeper, to the extent of two feet or more. It was good hard work, especially as we were all soft for it The sun. poured down on our backs with burping intensity, our hands blistered, and the round rocks and half cemented rubble that made the bar were not the easiest things in the world to remove. However, we kept at it Yank and I, having in times past been more or less accustomed to this sort of thing, got off much easier than did poor Johnny. About two feet down we came to a mixed coarse sand and stones, a little finer than the top dirt This seemed to us promising, so we resumed ,our washing operations. They bore the same results as had the first, which was just the whole of nothing. “We’ve got to hit it somewhere,” said Johnny between his teeth. “Let’s try another place.” z We scrambled rather wearily, but with a dogged determination, out of our shallow hole. Our blue eyed, long bearded friend was sitting on a convenient bowlder near at hand, his pipe between his teeth, watching our operations. “Got any tobacco, boys?” Jie inquired genially. “Smoked my last until tonight unless you’ll lend.” Yank produced a plug, from which the stranger shaved some parings. “Struck the dirt?” he inquired. “No; I see you haven’t.” He stretched himself and arose. “You aren’t washing this stuff!” he cried In amazement as his eye took in fully what we were about. Then we learned what we might have known before—but how should we?—that the gold was not to be found in any and every sort of loose earth that might happen to be lying about, but only In either a sort of blue clay or a pulverized granite. Sometimes this “pay dirt” would be found atop the ground. Again, the miner had to dig for it “All the surface diggings are taken up,” our friend told us, “so now you have to dig deep. It’s four feet down where I’m working. It’ll probably be deeper up here. You’d better move back where you were.” Yank stretched himself upright.

“Look here," he said decidedly, "levs get a little sense into ourselves. Here’s our pore old bosses standing with their packs on and we no place to stay and no dinner, and we’re scratchin’ away at this bar like a lot of fool hens. There’s other days cornin’.” Johnny and I agreed with the common sense of the thing, but reluctant-

ly. Now that we knew how, our enthusiasm surged up again. We wanted to get at IL The stranger’s eyes twinkled sympathetically. “Here, boys,” said he, “I know just how you feeL Come with me.” He snatched •up our bucket and strode back to his own claim, where he filled the receptacle with some of the earth he had thrown ouL “Go pan that.” he advised us kindly. We £aced to the water and once more stirred about the heavy contents of the pail until they had floated off with the water. In the bottom lay a fine black residue, and in that residue glittered the tiny yellow particles. We had actually panned our first gold! Our friend examined it critically. “That’s about a twelve cent pan,” he adjudged it Somehow in a vague way we had unreasonably expected millions at a twist of the wrist, and the words, “12 cents,” had a rankly penurious sound to us. However, the miner patiently explained that a twelve cent pan was a very good one, and indubitably it was real gold. Yank, being older and less excitable, had not accompanied us to the waterside. “Well, boys,” he drawled, “that 12 cents is highly satisfactory, of course, but in the meantime we’ve lost about S6OO worth of boss and grub.” Surely enough. animals had tired of waiting for us and had moved out packs and all. We hastily shouldered our implements. “Don’t you want to keep this claim next me?” inquired our acquaintance. We stopped. “Surely!” 1 replied. “But how do we do it?” “Just leave your pick and shovel in the hole.” “Won’t some one steal them?” “No.” “What’s to prevent?” I asked a little skeptically. * l ’ “Miner’s law,” he replied. We almost Immediately got trace of our strayed animals, as a number of men had seen them going upstream. In fact, we had no difficulty whatever in finding them, for they bad simply followed up the rough stream bed between the canyon walls until it had opened up to a gentler slope and a hanging garden of grass and flowerk. Here they had turned aside and were feeding. We caught them and were just heading them back when Yank stopped short “What’s the matter with this here?” he inquired. “Here’s feed and water near, and it ain’t so very far back to the diggings.” We looked about us for the first time with seeing eyes. The little up sloping meadow and dull red with flowers, below us the stream brawled foam flecked among black rocks, the high hills rose up to meet the sky, and at our backs across the way the pines stood thick serried. Far up in the blue heavens some birds were circling slowly. Somehow the leisurely swing of these unhasting birds struck from us the feverish hurry that had lately filled our souls. We drew deep breaths, and for the first time the great peace and majesty of these California mountains cooled our spirits. “I think it’s a bully place, Yank,” said Johnny soberly, “and that little bench up above us looks flat” We clambered across the slant of the flower spangled meadow to the bench, just within the fringe of the pines. It proved to be flaL and from the edge of it down the hill seeped a-little spring marked by the feathery bracken. We entered a cool i giecn place, peopled with shadows a th. the rare, considered notes of soft voiced birds. Just over our threshold, as it were, was the sunlit, chirpy, buzzing, brigbf colored busy world. Overhead a wind of many voices hummed through the pine tops. The golden sunlight flooded the mountains opposite, flashed from the stream, lay languorous on the meadow. Long bars of it slanted through an unguesaed gap in the hills behind us to touch with magic the very tops of the trees over our beads. The sbeen of the precious metal was over the land. (To be continued.)

“Where can we dig a little of this gold ourselves?”

We Actually Panned Our First Gold!