e pips; your legs would turn black, and when
you squeezed your fingers into the flesh the hole would stay. You'd get
rotten, then you'd mortify and die. But it's the easiest thing in the
world to cure. Nothing responds to treatment so readily."

He made a huge brew of green-spruce tea, of which we all partook, and in
a few days the Prodigal was fit again.

It was mid-March when we finished working out our ground. We had done
well, not so well, perhaps, as we had hoped for, but still magnificently
well. Never had men worked harder, never fought more desperately for
success. There were our two dumps, pyramids of gold-permeated dirt at
whose value we could only guess. We had wrested our treasure from the
icy grip of the eternal frost. Now it remained--and O, the sweetness of
it--to glean the harvest of our toil.

CHAPTER XIX

"The water's beginning to run, boys," said the Halfbreed. "A few more
days and we'll be able to start sluicing."

The news was like a flood of sunshine to us. For days we had been fixing
up the boxes and getting everything in readiness. The sun beat strongly
on the snow, which almost visibly seemed to retreat before it. The
dazzlingly white surface was crisp and flaky, and around the tree boles
curving hollows had formed. Here and there brown earth peered nakedly
through. Every day the hillside runnels grew in strength.

We were working at the mouth of a creek down which ran a copious little
stream all through the Springtime. We tapped it some distance above us,
and ran part of it along our line of sluice-boxes. These boxes went
between our two dumps, so that it was easy to shovel in from both sides.
Nothing could have been more convenient.

At last, after a day of hot sunshine, we found quite a freshet of water
coming down the boxes, leaping and dancing in the morning light. I
remember how I threw in the first shovelful of dirt, and how good it was
to see the bright stream discolour as our friend the water began his
magic work. For three days we shovelled in, and on the fourth we made a
clean-up.

"I guess it's time," said Jim, "or those riffles will be gettin' choked
up."

And, sure enough, when we ran off the water there were some of them
almost full of the yellow metal, wet and shiny, gloriously agleam in the
morning light.

"There's ten thousand dollars if there's an ounce," said the Company's
man, and the weigh-up proved he was right. So the gold was packed in two
long bucks