“That’s gold,” David said. “And from what I’ve been told, that’s quite a lot.”
“So we’ve found something?”
“We’ve found something, alright.”
David picked out the flakes and put them in a small tobacco pouch. Jim put another load of gravel in the pan, and they went back to work.
On his third shovelful, Jim found several flakes of his own. Some quite large.
They kept at it throughout the day. The work was painfully slow, but by the end of the day, the pouch was just shy of a quarter full.
“How much is that worth?” Jim looked at the pouch.
“Several dollars. Five, maybe six. The stream is rich.”
Five dollars. For a single day’s worth of work. In two days’ time, he could earn more than Ellen would for a full week. Jim stretched his back.
“It’s hard work,” David grinned. “Hard enough to make a young man old.”
“Yes, but if we earn that much every day.”
“Proper tools would help. A real mining pan.” David laughed and looked at the Dutch oven. “One that doesn’t weigh a half ton.”
“I can get one when I pick up Ellen.”
“What will you tell her?”
They’d both agreed to tell no one, not even the rest of the family, what they’d found. Once word got out, the valley would be completely overrun. Gold-mad prospectors would pour in by the thousands, and they’d overrun Jim’s dreams of a ranch.
“I’ll tell her I’d like to run a few pans while I’m out cutting timber.”
“A lie?” David said with a raised brow. “To my daughter?”
“Well…no. It’s true enough, just not the whole truth,” Jim said. “Besides, what would you have me say?”
“Just tell her it’s for me,” David said. “An indulgence to an old man’s dreams.”
Jim grunted a response.
David looked over the stream and said, “We could make a sluice box.”
“A what?”
“A sluice box. Angled wooden box with a material called miner’s moss in it. You run water down the bottom of the box, over the miner’s moss, then slowly add in the gravel. The gold gets trapped in the moss and the gravel washes out the open end.”
“Sounds easier than panning.”
“Considerably easier, and you can run through material a lot faster.” David held up the tobacco pouch. “We could have found four times this much today.”
Jim’s brows lifted. “What would we need for that?”
“Lumber. I’m sure you can come up with that. Miner’s moss will be the hard one. No way to get that without rousing suspicion.”
“We’ll have to come up with something.”
“We will. But for now we’ll keep it to panning only. What we need to do,” David paused to look upstream, “is find out where it’s coming from.”
“Coming from?”
“Somewhere up this stream, probably in the mountains, there’s a vein of gold that all this has been slowly breaking off of. That’s where the real money is. Find it, file a proper claim, and then we’ll have all the gold we’d ever need. We can buy a ranch wherever we want.”
“What will you do with your share?” Jim asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll take Abigail and find a nice little place to settle down. Old men have quiet dreams.”
“We can’t keep this secret forever,” Jim said.
“No, but the longer we can, the more we can pull out of the stream for ourselves,” David said. “And the better chance we have of finding where the gold is coming from.”
* * * *
The work wasn’t easy. For days on end, they took turns in the stream, panning their way ever higher against the current, reasoning that if the gold ran out, that would give them an idea of where the source lay.
One day, while David was panning, Jim rode the length of the stream. Several smaller streams merged into it at different points, all now swollen with the growing spring runoff. Some of these would go dry once the melt ended, but any of them could have carried the gold along.
He dismounted at each joining, using the shovel to run a quick pan. None of the feeder streams showed gold, but the main channel always held at least a few flakes. Once, he found a chunk of white quartz the size of a robin’s egg with a fat, ragged line of gold tracing the length of it. He pocketed it. When the time came to tell her, it would make a perfect gift for Ellen.
The wives suspected something, especially when Jim bought a second mining pan, but so far the secret remained. Their stockpile of gold slowly increased. They filled two of the small tobacco bags, then an empty flour sack. David estimated that they’d panned out over a thousand dollars’ worth.
