The Desert Rat helped the mozo unpack the burros, while the man from
Boston tore some pages from his notebook and proceeded to write out his
location notices and cache them in monuments which he built beside those
of his predecessors. He even copied the exact wording on the Desert
Rat's notices. He forgot his blistered heel and worked with prodigious
energy and interest, receiving with dogged silent disdain the humorous
sallies of the Desert Rat, to whom the other's sudden industry was a
source of infinite amusement. The Desert Rat and the Indian were busy
with pans and prospector's picks gouging out “stringers” and crevices
and picking up scattered pieces of “jewelry” rock. When all the “color”
in sight had been cleaned up, the Desert Rat produced a drill and a
stick of dynamite from the pack, put in a “shot” and uncovered a
pocket of such richness that even the stolid Cahuilla could not forbear
indulgence in one of his infrequent Spanish expletives. It was a deposit
of rotten honeycombed rock that was nine-tenths pure gold--what is known
in the parlance of the prospector as a “kidney.”
The disgruntled claimant to a half interest in the Baby Mine reached
into the hole and seized a nugget worth fully a thousand dollars. The
Desert Rat tapped him smartly across the knuckles with the handle of his
prospector's pick and made him drop it.
“If you please, Boston” he said gently. “You're welcome to share my
grub, and I'll whack up even with you on the water, and I'll cook for
you and wait on you, but I'll be doggoned if it isn't up to you to
furnish your own dynamite. There was ten thousand in loose stuff lying,
on the surface, and you might have been pardoned for helping yourself to
as much of it as you could carry personally, but you elected to restake
the claim and now all that easy picking belongs to the Indian and me.
He's a good Indian and I'm going to let him have some of it. He won't
take much because he's fond of me. I saved him from being lynched for
killing a white man who deserved it. But for years he's just hungered
for a top-buggy, with side bars and piano box and the whole blamed rig
painted bright red, so he can take his squaw out in style; and I'm going
to see that he gets it. However, that's neither here nor there. You keep
your fingers out of the sugar bowl, old sport. It's a lovely sight and
hard to resist, I know, but do be careful.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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