"'To cut these beastly vines and roots with.'

"'Dear me! Shall I go home and fetch it?'

"'No, you needn't', crossly. 'By the time you got here with it you would
have to go right back to get supper. It is half past one o'clock now,
and I have been at work an hour.'

"'But you were going to work all day, weren't you?' He had scarcely made
an impression on that tundra, and not a single nugget had we seen.

"With that he planted a few more good, hard jabs into the thicket of
moss, vines and leaves, trying to get the hole four feet square anyway,
after my rather uncalled for taunt about its size.

"In the meanwhile I was not wasting my time. I was using the pick upon a
cluster of bunch grass hummocks, wishing to fill the gold pan with dirt
from underneath that I might wash it out and see if it contained
'colors'.

"Somehow I felt more subdued like, perhaps because I was growing tired;
but Pa seemed to be affected differently. I could hear him grumbling to
himself, and that was a bad sign. By and by his shovel struck something
hard. He uttered an oath.

"'Pa Morrison!' I exclaimed, 'Ain't you ashamed of yourself? To think of
your swearing like that. It's awful! Give me that shovel instantly.'

"'I won't!'

"'Give me that shovel, I say,' for we were both church members and had
been for many years, and I was inexpressibly shocked at his profanity,
and wished to remove the cause.

"'Shut your head, Mary Morrison! Whose doing this mining, will you tell
me?'

"'O, of course you are, but then I wanted to help you if I could,'
trying to speak quietly and coming close enough to take the instrument
of dispute from his hand if he would let me.

"No reply.

"'What did you strike, Pa, that made the shovel ring just now?'

"'Shovel!--ring!--It was ice! bloomin', blasted, infernal ice, I tell
you,' he shouted in a rage, standing in black muck almost to his knees,
with the same material bespattered over him from head to foot. Indeed
his red and perspiring face showed a couple of great, black smirches
with which he had unknowingly beautified himself.

"He was fairly sizzling with wrath. 'Git down here yourself, and go to
work, and see how you like it,' he shouted excitedly, forgetting his
English and everything but that we had encountered an astonishingly hard
proposition, and it had gotten the best of us. Like an old clock he was
wound up and could not stop.

"'No gold, no nuggets, no grass roots even; nothing but m