"Now, you walk backward three steps, then four to the left, then back
five more--ain't that it?" turning to Johnson.
"That's it!" says Johnson, slapping his leg. "That's her! The same
old game! Lord! how it all comes back to a feller!"
"And just where you land, you dig," finishes Ag, handing Daggett's pick.
Daggett sinks the pick to the eye the first crack.
"Gosh!" says he. "Seems kind of soft here!"
"Is that so?" cried Aggy, highly excited. "Then you've struck gold for
sure!" Having put it there himself he felt reasonably certain about it.
Well, they scraped up the bedrock, and Aggy offered to let Johnson pan
it, but Johnson said he'd had to quit mining because his hands got so
sore swinging a pan, so Daggett he kind of scrambled the dirt out after
a fashion, and there at the bottom was our ounce and a half of gold!
Well, I want to tell you there was some movement around there. We
weren't in the same fix of a friend of mine who loaded a pan for a
tenderfoot with four solid ounces, and when he slid the water around on
that nice little yeller new moon in the corner of the pan, "Humph!"
says the tenderfoot, "don't you get any more gold than that out of so
much dirt?"
Four ounces to the pan only means about a hundred thousand dollars a
day income.
"Gooramighty!" says my friend, plumb disgusted. "I'd have had to
borrow all the dust there is on the creek to satisfy you--did you think
it was all gold?"
It broke my heart to see the way that man Daggett washed the fine gold
into the creek, but he was familiar enough with handling the dust to
know that an ounce was good money, even if it did look small.
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