found weighed less'n a quarter
of an ounce, an' this one was stickin' in the bank o' the tail-race,
where the water had been washin' the earth away.

"He puts this last bit on a flat rock an' hammers it with a stone. It
beats out flat quite easy. Marshall wasn't no fool, an' he knew there
wasn't no yellow metal acted that way but gold or copper, an' native
copper ain't that color.

"There was one o' the mill-hands wi' Marshall at the time, a chap
called Peter Wimmer. He didn't know any more about gold'n Marshall
did, but he'd heard said that every metal, savin' gold, gets black if
it's boiled in strong lye. Marshall gets Wimmer to keep quiet by
promisin' him a stake in whatever's found, an' tries the boilin'
trick. The flakes o' metal stays put, an' shows nary a sign o'
tarnishin'.

"By this time, Marshall was gettin' pretty sure that what he'd found
was gold. He hadn't no notion of a gold mine, though, seein' he'd
never heard of any. He reckoned that these flakes must be gold that
had been buried by the Indians, long ago, an' had been washed down;
from a grave, maybe, or some o' the treasure that the Spaniards had
been huntin'.

"Jest the same, he was curious. He strolled away from the tail-race,
idle-like, an' started huntin' promiscuous. He found specks o' gold
all over. That settled him. He jumped on a horse an' rode down to
Cap'n Sutter wi' the news.

"Sutter was a whole lot more excited than Marshall was. He was
educated an' knew the history o' Mexico. He knew the Indians in
Californy had possessed gold in the time o' the first comin' o' the
Spaniards, an' he reckoned that gold must ha' come from somewhere.
There'd always been some talk o' gold around where the Spanish
missions had started, and, jest three years afore, a Spanish don had
sent some ore to Mexico, sayin' that there was gold an' silver
a-plenty around, an' the government had better get busy an' develop
it. But the Spaniards weren't havin' any. Ever since they got so badly
fooled, a couple o' hundred years afore, in their hunt for the 'Golden
Cities o' Cibola,'[6] they let Californy alone.

[Footnote 6: For the gold-hunting expedition of the Spanish
Conquistadores in North America--records of extraordinary heroism and
adventure--see the author's "The Quest of the Western World." For the
gold-stories of Ancient Mexico, see the author's "The Aztec-hunters."]

"Sutter didn't waste no time. He rode right back to the mill wi' the
foreman. They di