ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
Midnight Sun. Kat Martin
Читать онлайн.Название Midnight Sun
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781420128239
Автор произведения Kat Martin
Серия Sinclair Sisters Trilogy
Издательство Ingram
Something besides his height and solid, broad-shouldered build. Besides the fact that he was so obviously male.
She didn’t know exactly what it was—and she didn’t want to find out. She had better things to do than think about a guy like McCall Hawkins.
Still, the image of him standing there in his faded jeans and denim shirt was surprisingly hard to forget.
CHAPTER FOUR
The equipment arrived on schedule—something to do with the rain, no doubt. Fortunately, even with the mud, the road up the mountain was still passable. Charity wasn’t so sure it would be by the end of the day.
Men from D. K. Prospecting Supplies, Inc., unloaded the dredge and the rest of the machinery she and Buck had picked out, then headed back down the mountain before the mud got so deep they couldn’t make it. There was a workshop of sorts in one of the sheds out back and Buck had ordered the building materials he needed for the sluice box to be unloaded there.
“It’ll take a while to get everything put together,” he said, and started off in that direction, leaving Charity to examine the portable dredge the men had unloaded that would need to be assembled.
She had seen a variety of different kinds in the prospecting magazines she had been reading. A gold dredge was a piece of equipment that worked like an oversized vacuum cleaner, sucking creek water, rocks, gravel, and anything else it encountered into a long, flexible pipe at one end and dumping it into the sluice box at the other. Once the water passed through the box, it ran back into the creek, hopefully minus the gold it had been hiding.
Maude sauntered up just then. “That thing’s a real workhorse when it comes to findin’ gold, but you still gotta learn the basics. If a little rain don’t bother you, I can show you how to pan.” The sagging skin below her jaw jiggled as Maude looked down at the item in her hand, a round, green plastic gold pan, flat on the bottom with the slides sloping up. There were notches for catching gold about five inches long, maybe an inch and a half apart in one spot on the pan.
Charity grinned. “What’s a little rain when you’re lookin’ for color?” she said, using her best prospector’s accent.
“Come on, then. Let’s get to it.” They were wearing their knee-length yellow slickers, though the rain had slowed to a steady drizzle. Maude left her by the stream for a moment, returned to the cabin, and came back with the big plastic washtub they used to mop the floors.
“The gold pan is your basic minin’ tool,” she said. “But pannin’ ain’t as easy as it looks.”
Maude set the plastic tub in the sand at the edge of the water, bent down and filled Charity’s gold pan about a third full of stream gravel, then pulled a little glass vial from the pocket of her jeans.
“There’s a dozen flakes of gold in this here bottle.” She shook it, showing the flakes of gold suspended in the little tube of water. She opened the vial and dumped the gold and water into the pan. “The trick is to catch ’em.”
Maude began to demonstrate, first stirring the loose dirt and gravel into a state of suspension, then working the pan in a circular motion, slopping a little water over the brim with each rotation. “Gold is heavier than pret’ near anything else. If you use the pan just right, it’ll catch in the riffles and the gravel will slop on over.”
Sure enough, when Maude was done, the pan was empty except for the little slivers of gold in the notches. “Now you try it.”
Charity accepted the green plastic gold pan Maude gave her.
“Hold it over the tub like I did. When you’re done, we’ll count the flakes. Whatever you miss’ll wind up in the washtub and we can start all over again.”
Maude was right. It wasn’t as easy as it looked. After several tries, Charity had retrieved only a very few flakes. Then the sun broke through the clouds for a moment and when she stared into the pan, she saw a lot more gold.
“Look, Maude! There’s a whole bunch of it in here!”
Maude just shook her head. “That’s fool’s gold, honey. When the sun disappears, so will the glitter. Gold ain’t like that. That pretty yellow color stays true all the time.”
The clouds closed in again and the glitter of the fool’s gold disappeared just as Maude said. Charity kept at it. But after an hour of work, she had only caught half a dozen flakes. Her pant legs were wet, the toes of her hiking boots soaked—mental note to buy an extra pair on the next trip into Dawson—her feet freezing, and still she didn’t have the knack.
“It takes a hundred fifty, maybe two hundred pans to process a yard of gravel,” Maude said. “A good panner can manage maybe ten pans an hour, which means you can do ’bout half a yard a day, a little more if you get real good.”
Real good she wasn’t, and not real fast, either. It was backbreaking labor, but if the end product was gold …
Charity worked for another half an hour.
“Why don’t you take a rest?” Maude suggested. “Go on up to the house, warm up, and grab a bite to eat. You can try again a little later.”
“You go ahead.” Charity whirled the pan. “I’ll be up in a minute.” As soon as she got all twelve flakes. She’d come here for gold. She had known it wouldn’t be easy. She had always been a determined sort of person. Why should learning to pan for gold be any different?
“Suit yourself,” Maude said, turning toward the cabin, ambling up the bank in her funny seesaw gait.
Charity went back to work. By the time she finally captured all twelve flakes in her pan, she couldn’t feel her feet. But relief and a sense of accomplishment gave her a fresh shot of energy. She frowned as she stared down at the last flake glittering against the green of her plastic pan and started counting again, separating each thin piece with the end of a stick.
Nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Thirteen. Thirteen flakes of gold!
Charity’s hands started to tremble. She looked down at the gravel Maude had scooped from the stream that now sat in the bottom of the washtub, then gazed at the bright yellow pieces wedged into the riffles of her pan. A huge grin broke across her face and she turned and started running.
“Maude! Maude, come out here and see what I found in the creek!”
Standing in front of the window in his living room, Call lowered the binoculars he’d been using, only faintly guilty for spying on his pretty next-door neighbor.
He checked the heavy chrome Rolex strapped to his wrist. Three hours and forty-seven minutes. That’s how long she’d been standing out in the drizzle, working that damned gold pan. From the water stains on her clothes, he could see that her feet and legs were wet clear past her knees. She had to be freezing out there, but she hadn’t quit.
Damn fool woman. Probably come down with pneumonia.
Still, he had to give her credit. They couldn’t have paid him enough to stand out there in the drizzle that long.
He looked through the glasses again, saw the excitement flash in her face, watched her run frantically up the bank to the house. After all that work, it looked as if she’d been rewarded—found a little color, no doubt. It wasn’t hard to do up here, but apparently that didn’t lessen her excitement.
Call hadn’t felt that kind of thrill himself in so long he couldn’t remember.
Maybe he never would again.
Setting the binoculars down on the table beneath the window, he crossed the living room and opened the door leading into the big metal building he’d added to the house last year. It held his Jeep, a Chevy pickup he used for hauling supplies, a pair of snowmobiles, a canoe, and a wall full of other miscellaneous sporting gear.
His