air all thet;
an' goold of good grit, I reckon, too, or I'll swaller the durned lump,
I will, without sass!"

"Humph!" snorted the skipper, holding out his hand for it; "give us
holt, an' I'll prospect it fur ye, if ye like. They usest to tell me I
warn't a bad jedge when I wer at the Carraboo diggin's an' went in fur
minin'."

The little image of the Madonna was accordingly handed to him, and the
skipper's nose wrinkled up, and twitched and jerked sideways, while his
billy-goat beard bristled out like a porcupine's quills, as he sniffed
and examined the figure, turning it over and over in his hands and
feeling it, the same as Hiram had done. He even went so far as to pinch
it.

"Jee-rusalem!" he at length exclaimed; "it's gold, sure enuff!"

"Hooray!" again burst from the men around. "Hooray!"

"I don't see nothin' to holler fur," said Captain Snaggs, in response to
this, bringing them up, as the saying goes, `with a round turn,' as he
turned round angrily. "Guess ye won't find no more o' the same sort
skatin' round the ranche!"

But, just then, Jan Steenbock came on the scene.

He had been busily engaged overseeing the construction of a species of
coffer-dam across the shore at right angles and up to the keel of the
ship at the point where the tide came up to, just by the mizzen-chains;
so that the water should not get down into the excavation that the men
were digging until this should be deep enough to float the vessel, or,
at all events, assist in easing her off the beach--for, if flooded
prematurely, the labour would be doubled.

The hands helping him having, however, deserted for the nonce and joined
the rest of the crowd around Tom Bullover and Hiram, he came up, also,
to the spot where all of us were standing, with the object of coaxing
his gang back to their task. The sound of the men's wild shout and the
skipper's voice, raised in anger, as he thought, hastened his footsteps,
too, for he feared that some mischief was brewing, and that the crew had
mutinied at the least.

The moment he got near, though, he could perceive, from the grinning
faces and expression of those close by, that nothing very desperate was
in the wind; and, he was just on the point of asking what the row was
about, when, all at once, he caught sight of the image.

"Mein Gott!" he ejaculated, looking the picture of astonishment, and
more excited than I had ever seen him, from the first day I stepped on
board the ship unti