Page:Allan Dunn--Dead Man's Gold.djvu/230

216 played the beams of the two torches on the treasure-dump. To hold the mining phrase, the quartz was fairly rotten with the gold. The dynamite had rent away tons of the wall, the crisp edges of the fractures white as sugar, and tossed great splinters and cubes in heaps while two cracks went snaking up and out into the blackness. But the explosive had failed to pierce, or even indicate, the thickness of the wall. And everywhere it was larded with gold, sown with it, stuffed with it. Chunks of the precious mineral lay loose, torn from the matrix. There were hollows in the marble that had been packed with gold, there was not a square foot of it that did not contain some measure of yellow ore.

They hunkered down before the heap with the two torches stuck in crevices and, like so many stone-breakers on a country road, pecked away at the fragments with hammers and drills. Healy with his one arm was as avid as the rest. They cracked the quartz and picked out the virgin gold as if they had been cracking the walnuts of Midas, working on at frantic speed until sheer fatigue slowed them up. Each had his own heap of gold mingled with slivers of quartz and each looked instinctively to see how his compared with the rest, their faces weary, pinched, avaricious. Healy's pile was much the smallest. Stone got up.

"Hell!" he said, "this is a partnership proposition." And kicked all the gold together. "Let's put in another shot."

They all stretched stiffly as they rose and pounded