Once more at its end Napoleon looked up and spat on his hands.

“There ain’t nothing that can keep some women down ’cept a gravestone—­and I’ve seen some gravestones which was tilted.”

Despite the interest and amusement she felt in it all, Beth was becoming sleepy as she sat there in the sun.  She shook off the spell and arose, approaching closer to the bank and flume where Gettysburg was toiling.  He labored on, silently, for several minutes, then paused, straightened up by degrees, as if the folds in his back were stubborn, and looked at their visitor steadily, his glass eye particularly fixed.  One of his hands pulled down his jaw, and then it closed up with a thump.

“Guess this kind of a racket is sort of new to you, Mr. Kent,” he ventured.  “Ever seen gold washin’ before?”

“No,” Beth confessed, “and I don’t see where the gold is to come from now.”

Gettysburg chuckled.  “Holy toads!  Miners do a heap of work and never see it neither.  Me and Van and Napoleon has went through purg and back, many’s the time, and was lucky to git out with our skeletons, sayin’ nuthin’ about the gold.”

“Oh.”  She could think of nothing else to say.

“In fact Van was all that got me out onct—­Napoleon, too.  We wasn’t worth it, prob’ly.  That’s the joke on Van.  Since then us three cusses has starved, and froze, and clean roasted, chasin’ gold.”

“Oh.”

“We was lost in the snow, one winter, with nuthin’ to eat but a plug of tobacker, a can of vasolene, and a porous plaster.  We lived on that menu fer a week—­that and snow-soup.  But Van got us out all right—­packed Napoleon about five miles on his back.  Nap was so thin there wasn’t enough of him to die.”  His one good eye became dreamily focused on the past.  He smiled.  “But someways the desert is worse than the snow.  We got ketched three times without no water.  Never did know, Nap or me, how Van got our two old dried-up carcasses out the last time, down to Death Valley.  He’s a funny cuss, old Van.”

Once more Beth merely answered:  “Oh.”

“You bet!” resumed Gettysburg.  “He never quits.  It ain’t in him.  He works his hands off and his soul out of its socket, every time.”  He laughed heartily.  “Lord! we have done an awful lot of fool work fer nuthin’!  We’ve tackled tunnels and shafts, and several games like this, and pretty near died a dozen different styles—­all uneasy kinds of dyin’—­and we’ve lived when it was a darn sight uneasier than croakin’, and kept on tryin’ out new diggin’s, and kept on bein’ busted all the time.  ’Nuff to make a lemon laugh, the fun we’ve had.  But now, by Jupe! we’ve struck it at last—­and it ain’t a-goin’ to git away!”

“Oh, I’m glad—­I’m glad!” said Beth, winking back a bit of suspicious moisture that came unbidden in her eyes as she looked on this weather-beaten, hardship-beaten old figure, still sturdily ready for the fates.  “I’m sure you all deserve it!  I’m sure of that!”