Argosy All-Story Weekly, February 7, 1925 — page 79: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

CHEAP He leaned over and looked into the sluice _ ox. Against the cross strips were little slopes of gritty sediment that. glistened with — yellow points: miniature snowdrifts of black and gold against miniature fences. | ‘Evans was sputtering excitedly, saliva — bubbling in the corners of his loose mouth. “Must be five thousand dollars there if — there’s a nickel: just out of that last can! | _ was taking frem the creek in spite of them. I bet you we'll—” : Hogan was puffing and babbling over the diver’s shoulder. Quong’s eyes were slitted black lights. Dariel stepped back upon the raft. Fools, fools, fools, gloating ‘childishly over his gold. - 3 He spoke harshly, for the Seat time in weeks without effort to keep hatred out of his voice: 7 - “ Hogan, you and Evans get the dust out of there. Quong, get ready to go to Apple. Take both horses. I'll give you some of the. ioe Get a two-weeks’ supply of grub. et the grub as soon as you reach there so you can start back at daylight.” The two white men stared at him with. slack chins and round, astonished eyes. He turned away and. began to get out of the diving suit. Fools who thought he should. be chattering and giggling with a silliness to match their own! He went up to the cabin, leaving them to separate the gold. from the sand and gravel. a “ John ain’t such a durned ied winner, either,” Hogan said, whistling softly. All of the late atrood John Dariel sat on an empty box in front of the cabin, star- ing across the creek at the hills, while from behind the building came the ringing of hammers on iron, and the excited voices of Hogan and Evans. They spent ‘money recklessly in distant cities while they pre- pared the casing within which the diver would go deeper into the earth to-morrow. Dariel spent no gold in his mind. He dug gold out of the creek: dug it not so much for its value as for the vicious joy it- gave him to take it away from the guard-— ing water. He personified the creek so that — it might feel pain when he gouged the metal from its intestines, pain that would be in- tensified because Me qarkek: with Be bunglesome implements.. 7 — After a while the hasciedes stopped SS TOOLS. the two. laborers came around the corner- of the cabin to peau on the ground beside -Dariel. — xs She’s all set for to-morrow,” Evans 3 an- ‘nounced. Dariel nodded “without ee wished these two cheap tools would Ss away from him with their excessively bright eyes and their elation over the wealth he Hogan hunched his fat body nearer. “2 How long you think itl take to clean er up?” he asked, his thick lips moist. “Three or four days,” Dariel growled, and added, reluctantly, “ er maybe less, I’m down in loose gravel now.” “And then—” Hogan chucked a sebbie at Evans and laughed boisterously. = And then—” Evans repeated, a laughed. | Until edie Hogan and Evans pad without pause, of money, of how it could be spent to the maximum enjoyment; a gay verbal wasting of the hoard that had cost John Dariel all his own capacity for happi- ness. He lay on his bunk with closed eee listening and hating. All three arose early the next morning and the two laborers resumed their game of profligacy. The Chinese would not be back with the provisions until ten o’clock at the earliest; so Dariel put his twe help- _ers to work preparing another length of cas- ing, that there might be no delay. “ This will be the last one,” he told them. “ Even if I don’t get down to bed-rock in it Vl have to stop. ae next would be too small to work in.’ Their share of = gold seemed to become visible to them in this last piece of tubing; their hammers beat upon it with a pani rhythm that. had never been in their work _ before, and above the clangor sounded gusts of laughter and fragments of song. The morning passed and Quong did not. return. Hogan and Evans, their work done, ‘sat on a powlder- from ae they could watch the trail. Evans burned cigarettes one after the other and his lank frame fidg- _eted with new-found impatience. Beside him, Hogan wheezed around his black pipe _and wiped the perspiration from his bald - head with a faded shirt-sleeve. They looked - (049 (E() €0 mIChOO Sj