nt digging in
the pits. Everything was with them, rivals were few, the ground
uncrowded, the season dry. 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. She loitered about under the spread of the pine
boughs, cleaning and tidying up, and patching the ragged remnants of
their clothes. Often, as she sat propped against the trunk, her sewing
fell to her lap and she looked out with shining, spell-bound eyes. The
men were shapes of dark importance against the glancing veil of water,
the soaked sands and the low brushwood yellowing in the autumn's soft,
transforming breath. Far away the film of whitened summits dreamed
against the blue. In the midwash of air, aloft and dreaming, too, the
hawk's winged form poised, its shadow moving below it across the sea of
tree tops.

She would sit thus, motionless and idle, as the long afternoon wore
away, and deep-colored veils of twilight gathered in the canon. She
told the men the continuous sounds of their toil made her drowsy. But
her stillness was the outward sign of an inner concentration. If
delight in rest had replaced her old bodily energy, her mind had gained
a new activity. She wondered a little at it, not yet at the heart of
her own mystery. Her thoughts reached forward into the future, busied
themselves with details of the next twelve months, dwelt anxiously on
questions of finance. The nest-building instinct wa