e had vanished as though he had gone straight up.

His disappearance sobered the men. There was something uncanny about it;
they lowered their voices When they speculated and all their latent
superstition arose. Porcupine Jim declared that the place was "hoodooed"
and as evidence enumerated the many accidents and delays. Bruce himself
wondered if the malignant spirit of Slim was lingering on the river to
harry him as he had in life.

Smaltz was now in the power-house doing at last the specific work for
which he had been hired. To all Bruce's questions, he replied that the
machinery there was "doing fine." Down below, the pump-house motors were
far from satisfactory, sparking and heating in a way that Bruce, who did
not know the a, b, c's of electricity, could see was not right. While
the pumps and scrapers were working Banule dared not leave the motors
alone.

Then, after a couple of days' unsatisfactory work, the water dropped so
low in Big Squaw creek that there was only sufficient pressure to use
one scraper. Bruce discharged all the crew save Smaltz, Banule, and
Porcupine Jim, who labored in the kitchen--a living insult to the
Brotherhood of Cooks. While Bruce, by running back and forth between the
donkey-engine and the top sluice-box where the scraper dumped, managed
to do the work of two men ten hours a day.

His nerves were at a tension, for along with the strain of his
responsibilities was the constant fear of a serious break-down. Banule
made light of the sparking motors but the bearings were heating badly,
daily necessitating more frequent stops. When a grounded wire sent the
leaking current through the cable that pulled the scraper, and knocked
Bruce flat, he was not convinced by Banule's assurance that it "didn't
amount to much." It was all evidence to Bruce that fundamentally
something was wrong.

But in spite of the time lost the cut was deepening and the side walls
stood up so that every scraper that emptied into the sluice-boxes was
from the pay-streak. Bruce fairly gloated over each cubic yard that he
succeeded in getting in, for the sample pans showed that it was all he
had hoped for, and more.

If only the riffles were saving it and the tables catching the fine
gold!

This he could not know until the clean-up and he did not mean to stop
until he had brought in the last load he dared before a freeze. So far
the weather had been phenomenal, the exceptional open fall had been his
one good piece