It was the American River before the
Forty-niners swarmed along its edges, and there was gold in its sands,
sunk in a sediment below its muddy deposit, caked in cracks through the
rocks round which its currents had swept for undisturbed ages.
They worked feverishly, the threat of the winter rains urging them on.
The girl helped, leaving her kettle settled firm on a bed of embers
while the water heated for dish washing, to join them on the shore,
heaped with their earth piles. She kept the rocker in motion while the
old man dipped up the water in a tin ladle and sent it running over the
sifting bed of sand and pebbles. The heavier labor of digging was
Courant's. Before September was over the shore was honeycombed with
his excavations, driven down to the rock bed. The diminishing stream
shrunk with each day and he stood in it knee high, the sun beating on
his head, his clothes pasted to his skin by perspiration, and the thud
of his pick falling with regular stroke on the monotonous rattle of the
rocker.
Sometimes she was tired and they ordered her to leave them and rest in
the shade of the camp.
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