tream Big Squaw creek was, starting as it did all of thirty
miles back in the unknown hills, augmented as it came by trickling
rivulets from banks of perpetual snow and by mountain springs, until it
grew into a roaring torrent dashing itself to whiteness against the
green velvet boulders, which in ages past had crashed through the
underbrush down the mountainside to lie forever in the noisy stream!
And the unexpected fern-fringed pools darkened by overhanging boughs,
under which darted shadows of the trout at play--why he had thought, if
they had Big Squaw creek back in Iowa, or Nebraska, or Kansas, or any of
those dog-gone flat countries where you could look further and see less,
and there were more rivers with nothing in them than any other states in
the Union, they'd fence it off and charge admission. They'd--it was then
the idea had shot into his mind like an inspiration--they'd _harness_
Big Squaw creek if they had it back in Iowa, or Nebraska, or Kansas, and
make it work! They'd build a plant and develop power!

The method which had at once suggested itself to Sprudell was slow in
coming to Bruce because he was unfamiliar with electricity. In the
isolated districts where he had lived the simpler old-fashioned,
steam-power had been employed and his knowledge of water-power was
chiefly from reading and hearsay.

But he believed that it was feasible, that it was the solution of the
difficulty, if the expense were not too great. With a power-house at the
mouth of Squaw creek, a transmission wire across the river and a
pump-house down below, he could wash the whole sand-bar into the river
and all the sand-bars up and down as far as the current would carry! In
his excitement he had tried to outline the plan to Toy, who had more
that intimated that he was mad.

The Chinaman had said bluntly: "No can do."

Placer-mining was a subject upon which Toy felt qualified to speak,
since, after a cramped journey from Hong Kong, smuggled in his uncle's
clothes hamper, he had started life in America at fourteen, carrying
water to his countrymen placering in "Chiny" Gulch; after which he
became one of a company who, with the industry of ants, built a trestle
of green timber one hundred and fifty feet high to carry water to the
Beaver Creek diggings and had had his reward when he had seen the
sluice-box run yellow with gold and had taken his green rice bowl
heaping full upon the days of division.

Those times were quick to pass,