Page:Jackson Gregory--joyous trouble maker.djvu/227

Rh out; the Goblet down here at the bottom is about twelve feet in diameter. Say the deposit is ten feet deep …

Turk very naturally stared at him, startled. Seeing the mud on Steele's arm, the seeming pebbles in his hand, Turk stooped and thrust down his own arm. He brought up a lump of some hard substance the size of a goose egg, which he rubbed against his overalls. And, as luck would have it, for not even Steele hoped that every rock in this giant's catch-all was precious, the lump in Turk's hand was shot through with soft, crumbling gold.

"Good Gawd!" whispered Turk. And had the men still been above, peering down, there would have been no doubt of his sudden pallour [sic]. His face went chalky white, his eyes bulged suddenly. It might have been a ghost and not gold that he was looking upon.

"Free gold!" cried Steele triumphantly. "Gold that doesn't even need to be mined. Why, old Thunder River has been mining it since Cain and Abel's time, piling it down here, hoarding it away. A man can scoop it up with a tin dipper."

Turk stared and nodded, stared and nodded.

"Yes, sir," he said shakily. "It's like that. In a tin dipper, by Gawd! … Let's tell ol' Bill Rice. …" "There are pockets and broken veins of gold all through these mountains," Steele was saying thoughtfully. "The Little Giant picked up one of them that ran full blast all last year and now has pinched out as clean as a whistle. Thunder River found another and