The men set up the sluice box, which the taos had brought along with labor and disgust, and giving me a revolver, commissioned me to see that the excavating department kept busy.  So I sat on the edge of a twenty-foot bank clasping the Colt, and hanging my feet into vacancy.  I hadn’t felt so close to childhood for many a long year.

For an hour or so all went well, and the cheerful tao dug and delved and carried without murmur.  Then his diligence subsided and there was a talk of “siesta.”  Somebody down at the sluice box shouted, “Keep busy up there”; so, after one or two efforts to hurry up our minions, I pointed the pistol carefully into the ground and fired.  They all jumped prodigiously and looked around.  But I couldn’t play the part.  I didn’t look stern, and I simply sat there grinning fatuously with the sense of my own valor, whereupon the taos burst into a shout of laughter and seemed to think a bond of friendship had been established between us.  They got lazier and lazier and smiled at me more and more openly, and made what I judged to be remarks about my personal appearance.  So at another convenient opportunity I let off another shot, which was a worse fizzle than the first.  One old fellow whose back was glistening with sweat turned and winked at me, and another pretended to hunt for imaginary wounds.

Recognizing that I was an ignominious failure in the public works department, I left it to manage itself and strolled over to add my inexperience and ignorance to the sluicing agency.

Mrs. L——­ had anticipated me and was already advising the willing workers when I appeared.  On the whole, they were pretty patient about it all, and let us ask innumerable questions and make suggestions (which, however, they never observed) ad libitum.

But however little I knew about gold-mining, I have shared one thing with the real prospector—­the eager, fascinated, breathless suspense of staring into a fold of blanket for “color.”  When we really saw a vagrant glint here and there, what delight!—­delight easily quenched by Mr. L——­, however, who declared the yield too small for a paying basis.

All that hot summer day, we dug and washed and watched, but with unsatisfactory results.  In the long-shadowed afternoon we packed traps and set off down the valley.  The egrets, camping by dozens on feeding carabao, flapped away as we approached; we found our baroto as we had left it, rising gently on the incoming tide in the shade of a clump of bamboo.

The homeward journey, if not one of resignation to the will of Providence, had its compensation in the loveliness of afternoon lights and the cool, peaceful silence of the forests.  We avoided the insidious snares of kut-i-kut, but found our lagoon just bestowed for the night, snug, glassy, with the dusk creeping on and on.  Thence we passed into the open sea, were cradled gently into our own bay, and saw the coastguard station at the inlet send ruddy gleams across