After working for about half an hour, I retraced my
steps with my basket to the spot where we had tethered
the horses, and found the animals still standing there
with their burdens on their backs. Mr. Malcolm
was already there; he had with him about an equal quantity
of the precious black sand; it remained, however,
to be seen what proportion of gold our heaps contained.
In a short time Bradley and Don Luis joined us, both
of them in tip-top spirits. “I guess this
is the way we do the trick down in these clearings,”
said the former, shaking a bag of golden sand.
As for Jose, Don Luis’s Indian servant, he was
devout in his expressions of thanksgiving to the Virgin
Mary and the Great Spirit, whom he would insist upon
classifying together, in a most remarkable and not
quite orthodox manner.
We now set to work to get up our tent. Malcolm,
in the meantime, prepared coffee and very under-baked
cakes, made of the flour we had brought with us.
His cooking operations were greatly impeded by our
eagerness to dry the sand we had scraped up—a
feat in the achievement of which Bradley was clumsy
enough to burn a hole in our very best saucepan.
However, we managed to get the moisture absorbed, and,
shutting our eyes, we commenced blowing away the sand
with our mouths, and shortly after found ourselves
the possessors of a few pinch’s of gold.
This was encouraging for a beginning. We drunk
our coffee in high spirits, and then, having picketted
our horses, made ourselves as snug as our accommodation
would allow, and, being tired out, not only with the
journey and the work, but with excitement and anxiety,
slept soundly till morning.
CHAPTER IX.
Two horses stray away
How orders were enforced at the diggings
Sunday work
Nature of the soil
Inconveniences even in gold getting
Dinner and rest
A strike for higher wages
A walk through the diggings
Sleeping and smoking
Indians and finery
Californians and Yankee
Runaway sailors and stray negroes
A native born Kentuckian
“That’s a fact”
A chapel at the diggings
A supper with an appetite.
The morning broke brilliantly, and the first thing
we discovered on rising was, that two of the horses
had broken their fastenings during the night, and
strayed. As we could not afford to lose the animals,
Jose and Horry were despatched lo look after them,
and they grumbled not a little at being thus sent
off from the scene of golden operations; but Bradley,
producing a rifle, swore that he would shoot them both
unless they obeyed orders; so, after a little altercation,
away they went.
