“You old son of a gun!”

Van thought the storms had raged sufficiently.

“Is work unpopular, or did the wind blow the water from the creek?”

“I like to work,” admitted Gettysburg, “but it’s fun to watch you epicures eatin’.”

Beth felt embarrassed.

“Epicures?” echoed Napoleon.  “You don’t know what an epicure is?  That’s a vulgar remark when you don’t know no meaning of a word.”

“Epicure?  Me not know what an epicure is?” replied old Gettysburg aggressively.  “You bet I do.  An epicure’s a feller which chaws his fodder before he swallers it.”

Napoleon subsided.  Then he arose and sauntered out to work, Dave and Gettysburg following.  Van hastily drank his cup of coffee, which, as he had predicted, was not particularly good, and started for the others.  He halted in the door.

“Make yourself comfortable, if you can here, Kent,” he said.  “You had an exhausting experience yesterday.  Perhaps you had better lie down.”

Beth merely said:  “Thank you.”  But her smile was more radiant than sunshine.

CHAPTER XXVIII

WORK AND SONG

Having presently finished her breakfast, Beth joined the group outside, curious to behold the workings of a placer mine in actual operation.

There was not much to see, but it was picturesque.  In their lack of funds the partners had constructed the simplest known device for collecting the gold from the sand.  They had built a line of sluices, or troughs of considerable length, propped on stilts, or supports about knee high, along the old bed of the canyon.  The sluices were mere square flumes, set with a fairly rapid grade.

Across the bottom of all this flume, at every yard or less of its length, small wooden cleats had been nailed, to form the “riffles.”  Into the hoses the water from the creek was turned, at the top.  The men then shoveled the sand in the running stream and away it went, sluicing along the water-chute, its particles rattling down the wooden stairway noisily.  The gold was expected to settled behind the riffles, owing to its weight.

All the flume-way dripped from leakages.  The sun beat down upon the place unshaded.  Water escaped into all the pits the men were digging as they worked, so that they slopped around in mud above their ankles.  Dave wore rubber boots and was apparently protected.  As a matter of fact the boots promptly filled with water.  Napoleon and Gettysburg made no effort to remain dry shod, but puddled all day with soused footgear.

Van rode off to the “reservation town,” a mile below the hill, to bargain for a tent reported there for sale.  Sleeping quarters here on the claim were far too crowded.  Until lumber for a cabin could be purchased they must make what shifts they might.

It had taken but the briefest time for the miners to go at their work.  Beth stood near, watching the process with the keenest interest.  It seemed to her a back-breaking, strenuous labor.  These sturdy old fellows, grown gray and stooped with toil—­grown also expectant of hardship, ill-luck, and privations—­were pathetic figures, despite their ways of cheer.