“Think it easy, jackanapes?” She wrenched back the shower curtain, revealing a few inches of brackish water flowing along the bottom of the tub as if in a creekbed. “If ye gentlemen won’t mind?” She handed two miner’s pans to Beckett and me and spun a third like a pie plate on the tip of her middle finger. “Ye’ll want to scoop up some of that ere river bottom and a slick of water on top and swirl it about, keeping an eye on it the whole time. Ye sift and watch for the telltale glister.”
The old man caught on at once, and squatted on the tiles, intent on the muck he had dredged. Less certain as to how it would work, and worried in part over the mess we were making and the future task of scouring the surface, I bent to it with reluctance. I shaved two inches of gravelly mud and a half inch of water and stared at the bottom of the pan, past the reflection of my own face, seeing nothing more than a dismal reminder of my own dull life. How had I ended up with these strangers? There was no one there to truly trust, and the questions swirled in my brainpan. A speck flashed in the dirt, and with the end of my little finger, I picked it from the silt like a surgeon. “Eureka!” I said, holding up the flake for all to see. The old man grinned at my discovery and tried to conceal his pan in the folds of his robe, but not before I could see the collection of nuggets as big and plentiful as a mouthful of teeth.
A titter tweeted from woman to woman at the sight of our comparative luck. I knew right away that Flo’s story would involve a certain amount of fate and chance, as do all such stories about the acquisition of wealth. I have never been a lucky man, not in love or fortune, but more of a determined plodder. More pluck than luck. When their giggles edged toward laughter, I took the only viable option: I stuck my finger in my mouth and ate the golden speck.
“I see ye have the appetite, too,” Flo said, as she pulled shut the shower curtain.
One bite—or once bitten by the gold bug—ye will not let off till ye’ve made your mark or it has broken both body and spirit. Many who toiled by the rivers, those who sailed half the world or beat the dusty trail, many were broke by the experience and went back home the poorer or made a new life in California, up Sacramento way or lured to the Barbary Coast of San Francisco. Could be side by side in the same river. One man becomes rich, the other remains a fool.
Flo and Jams staked a claim to a rick tributarying offen the American River, and worked it fierce in twelve-hour hanks, pausing only the Lord’s day as commanded. Eked by the first four months on little more than hope and nerve, enough to keep them on the spot and not give in, one urging the other when they was low. Downstream in a natural gulley, four greasers up from Sonora way played out a rich deposit, and though they could not understand a word of Mexican, Flo and Jamie sensed enough to tell when the wheel of fortune swings someone’s way.
“Them boys,” Jams said, “knows somethin’ we don’t. We just drib and drab and they must have pulled an ounce a day out one spot over.”
She cogitated for a spell, put down her pan, and walked the hillside watching the foursome in the distance. That night over their beans and rabbit, the idear hit her sudden, like the old apple offen Newton’s tree. “Gravity,” she announced, as if discovering it. “Ever know the notion? Says the heavier a thing is, more it seeks out the bottom. We’re on the side of a hill, and they in the dip. Where the river naturally sets, that’s where to look. All that gold sunk down there, like treasure at the bottom of the sea.”
With the femur of that hare, Jams pointed at her like a schoolmaster driving home the lesson. “Flo, if ye are right, we will never do more at this here claim. We quit it and find a bottom spot, life becomes the easier.”