Digging for Gold: Adventures in California, R. M. Ballantyne [fastest ebook reader txt] 📗

“Including gold,” assented Frank; and there it all lies—has lain since creation—hundreds of thousands of acres of splendid land unoccupied.

“Ha! there’s a screw loose somewhere,” said Joe, taking the pipe from his lips and looking at it earnestly, as if the remark were addressed to it, “somethin’ out o’ j’int—a plank started, so to speak—cer’nly.”

“No doubt of it,” said Frank; “and the broad acres which we now look upon, as well as those over which we have lately travelled, are as nothing compared with the other waste but fertile lands in America, on which hundreds of thousands of the human race might live happily. Yet, strange to say, men seem to prefer congregating together in little worlds of brick, stone, and mortar, living tier upon tier above each other’s heads, breathing noxious gases instead of the scent of flowers, treading upon mud, stone, and dust, instead of green grass, and dwelling under a sky of smoke instead of bright blue ether—and this, too, in the face of the Bible command to ‘go forth and replenish the earth.’”

“Yes, there’s great room,” said Joe, “for the settin’ up of a gin’ral enlightenment an’ universal emigration society, but I raither think it wouldn’t pay.”

“I know it wouldn’t, but why not?” demanded Frank.

“Ah, why not?” repeated Joe.

As neither of them appeared to be able to answer the question, they both remained for some time in a profound reverie, Frank gazing as he was wont to do into the fire, and Joe staring through smoke of his own creation at the vaquero, who reclined on the opposite side of the fire enjoying the tobacco to the full by letting it puff slowly out at his nose as well as his mouth.

“Joe,” said Frank.

“Ay, ay, sir,” answered Joe with nautical promptitude.

“I have been thinking a good deal about our affairs of late, and have come to the conclusion that the sooner we go home the better.”

“My notions pre-cisely.”

“Moreover,” continued Frank, “I think that we have come far enough in this direction, and that it would be a good plan to return to Bigbear Gully by a different route from that by which we came here, and thus have an opportunity of seeing some of the other parts of the diggings. What say you to that?”

“I’m agreeable,” answered Joe.

“Well then, shall we decide to commence our return journey to-morrow?”

“By all means. Down wi’ the helm, ’bout ship an’ lay our course on another tack by daylight,” said Joe, shaking the ashes out of his pipe with the slow unwilling air of a man who knows that he has had enough but is loath to give up; “I always like to set sail by daylight. It makes one feel up to the mark so to speak, as if one had lost none of the day, and I suppose,” he added with a sigh which resolved itself into a yawn, “that if we means to start so bright an’ early the sooner we tumble in the better.”

“True,” said Frank, whose mouth irresistibly followed the example of Joe’s, “I think it will be as well to turn in.”

There was a quiet, easy-going lowness in the speech and motions of the two friends, which showed that they were just in a state of readiness to fall into the arms of the drowsy god. They rolled themselves in their blankets, placed their rifles by their sides, their heads on their saddles, and their feet to the fire.

Joe Graddy’s breathing proclaimed that he had succumbed at once, but Frank lay for a considerable time winking owlishly at the stars, which returned him the compliment with interest by twinkling at him through the branches of the overhanging trees.

Early next morning they arose, remounted their mules and turned back, diverging, according to arrangement, from their former track, and making for a particular part of the diggings where Frank had been given to understand there were many subjects of interest for his pencil. We would fain linger by the way to describe much of what they saw, but the limits of our space require that we should hasten onward, and transport the reader at once to a place named the Great Cañon, which, being a very singular locality, and peculiarly rich in gold, merits description.

It was a gloomy gap or gorge—a sort of gigantic split in the earth—lying between two parallel ranges of hills at a depth of several hundred feet, shaped like a wedge, and so narrow below that there was barely standing room. The gold all lay at the bottom, the slopes being too steep to afford it a resting-place.

The first diggers who went there were said to have gathered vast quantities of gold; and when Frank and Joe arrived there was quite enough to repay hard work liberally. The miners did not work in companies there. Indeed, the form of the chasm did not admit of operations on a large scale being carried on at any one place. Most of the men worked singly with the pan, and used large bowie-knives with which they picked gold from the crevices of the rocks in the bed of the stream, or scratched the gravelly soil from the roots of the overhanging trees, which were usually rich in deposits. The gorge, about four miles in extent, presented one continuous string of men in single file, all eagerly picking up gold, and admitting that in this work they were unusually successful.

But these poor fellows paid a heavy price for the precious metal in the loss of health, the air being very bad, as no refreshing breezes could reach them at the bottom of the gloomy defile.

The gold at that place was found both in very large and very small grains, and was mixed with quantities of fine black sand, which the miners blew off from it somewhat carelessly—most of them being “green hands,” and anxious to get at the gold as quickly as possible. This carelessness on their part was somewhat cleverly taken advantage of by a keen old fellow who chanced to enter the hut of a miner when Frank and Joe were there. He had a bag on his back and a humorous twinkle in his eye.

“Well, old foxey, what do you want?” asked the owner of the hut, who happened to be blowing off the sand from a heap of his gold at the time.

“Sure it’s only a little sand I want,” said the man, in a brogue which betrayed his origin.

“Sand, Paddy, what for?”

“For emery, sure,” said the man, with a very rueful look; “troth it’s myself as is gittin’ too owld entirely for the diggin’s. I was a broth of a boy wance, but what wid dysentery and rheumatiz there’s little or nothin’ o’ me left, so I’m obleeged to contint myself wid gatherin’ the black sand, and sellin’ it as a substitute for emery.”

“Well, that is a queer dodge,” said the miner, with a laugh.

“True for ye, it is quare, but it’s what I’m redooced to, so av you’ll be so kind as plaze to blow the sand on to this here tray, it’ll be doin’ a poor man a good turn, an’ costin’ ye nothin’.”

He held up a tin tray as he spoke, and the miner cheerfully blew the sand off his gold-dust on to it.

Thanking him with all the fervour peculiar to his race, the Irishman emptied the sand into his bag, and heaving a heavy sigh, left the hut to request a similar favour of other miners.

“You may depend on it,” said Frank, as the old man went out, “that fellow is humbugging you. It is gold, not sand, that he wants.”

“That’s a fact,” said Joe Graddy, with an emphatic nod and wink.

“Nonsense,” said the miner, “I don’t believe we lose more than a few specks in blowing off the sand—certainly nothing worth speaking of.”

The man was wrong in this, however, for it was afterwards discovered that the sly old fellow carried his black sand to his hut, and there, every night, by the agency of quicksilver, he extracted from the sand double the average of gold obtained by the hardest working miner in the Cañon!

At each end of this place there was a hut made of calico stretched on a frame of wood, in which were sold brandy and other strong liquors of the most abominable kind, at a charge of about two shillings for a small glass! Cards were also to be found there by those who wished to gamble away their hard-earned gains or double them. Places of iniquity these, which abounded everywhere throughout the diggings, and were the nightly resort of hundreds of diggers, and the scene of their wildest orgies on the Sabbath-day.

Leaving the Great Cañon, our travellers—we might almost term them inspectors—came to a creek one raw, wet morning, where a large number of miners where at work. Here they resolved to spend the day, and test the nature of the ground. Accordingly, the vaquero was directed to look after the mules while Frank and Joe went to work with pick, shovel, and pan.

They took the “dirt” from a steep incline considerably above the winter level of the stream, in a stratum of hard bluish clay, almost as hard as rock, with a slight surface-covering of earth. It yielded prodigiously. At night they found that they had washed out gold to the value of forty pounds sterling! The particles of gold were all large, many being the size of a grain of corn, with occasional nuggets intermixed, besides quartz amalgamations.

“If this had been my first experience o’ them there diggin’s,” said Joe Graddy, as he smoked his pipe that night in the chief gambling and drinking store of the place, “I would have said our fortin wos made, all but. Hows’ever, I don’t forget that the last pair o’ boots I got cost me four pound, an’ the last glass o’ brandy two shillin’s—not to speak o’ death cuttin’ an’ carvin’ all round, an’ the rainy season a-comin’ on, so it’s my advice that we ’bout ship for home as soon as may be.”

“I agree with you, Joe,” said Frank, “and I really don’t think I would exchange the pleasure I have derived from journeying through this land, and sketching the scenery, for all the gold it contains. Nevertheless I would not like to be tempted with the offer of such an exchange!—Now, I’ll turn in.”

Next morning the rain continued to pour incessantly, and Frank Allfrey had given the order to get ready for a start, when a loud shouting near the hut in which they had slept induced them to run out. A band of men were hurrying toward the tavern with great haste and much gesticulation, dragging a man in the midst of them, who struggled and protested violently.

Frank saw at a glance that the prisoner was his former companion Bradling, and that one of the men who held him was the stranger who had been so badly wounded by him at the camp-fire, as formerly related.

On reaching the tavern, in front of which grew a large oak-tree—one of the limbs of which was much chafed as if by the sawing of a rope against it—the stranger, whose comrades called him Dick, stood up on a stump, and said—

“I tell you what it is, mates, I’m as sure that he did it as I am of my own existence. The man met his death at the hands of this murderer Bradling; ha! he knows his own name, you see! He is an escaped convict.”

“And what are you?” said Bradling, turning on him bitterly.

“That is no man’s business, so long as I hurt nobody,” cried Dick passionately. “I tell you,” he continued, addressing the crowd, which had quickly assembled, “I found this fellow skulking in the bush close to where the body was found, and I know he did it, because he all but murdered me not many months ago, and there,” he continued, with a look of surprise,