“That,” he explained, “is damming a river around its bed and washing the opened gravel. It takes a lot of money, a lot of work and men; and sometimes it pays big, and often it doesn't. I guess there were fifty of us at it. We slaved all the dry season at the dam and flume, a big wood course for the stream; we had wing dams for the placers and ditches, and the best prospects for eight or ten weeks' washing. It was early in September when we were ready to start, and on a warm afternoon I said to an old pardner, 'What do you make out of those big, black clouds settling on the peaks?' He took one look--the wind was a steady and muggy southwester--and then he sat down and cried. The tears rolled right over his beard. “It was the rains, nearly two months early, and the next day dams, flume, boards, and hope boiled down past us in a brown mash. That left me poorer than I'd ever been before; I had more when I was home on the wharves.” “Wait,” she interrupted him, rising; “if you're coming back to supper I must put the draught on the stove.” From the kitchen she heard him singing in a low, contented voice: “'The pilot bread was in my mouth, The gold dust in my eye, And though from you I'm far away, Dear Anna, don't you cry!'” Then: “'Oh, Ann Eliza! Don't you cry for me. I'm going to Calaveras With my wash bowl on my knee.'” She returned and resumed her position with her hands folded. “And that,” Jason Burrage told her, “was how I learned gold mining in California. I sank shafts, too, and worked a windlass till the holes got so deep they had to be timbered and the ore needed a crusher. But after the fluming I knew what to wait for. I kept going in a sort of commerce for a while--buying old outfits and selling them again to the late comers--a pick or shovel would bring ten dollars and long boots fifty dollars a pair. I got twenty-four dollars for a box of Seidlitz powders. Then in 'Fifty-four I went in with three scientific men--one had been a big chemist at Paris--and things took a turn. We had the dead wood on gold. Why, we did nothing but re-travel the American Fork and Indian Bar, the Casumnec and Moquelumne, and work the tailings the earlier miners had piled up and left, just like I had south. We did some pretty things with cyanide; yes, and hydraulics and powder. “Things took a turn,” he repeated; “investments in stampers and so on, and here I am.” After he had gone--supper, she had informed him, was at five exactly--Olive had the bewildered feeling of partially waking from an extraordinary dream. Yet the buckskin bag on the table possessed a weighty actuality. *****