RAINBOW GOLD

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 65, Issue 144, 31 March 1945, Page 6

RAINBOW GOLD

Serial Story.

(Copyright). A Gold-mining Adventure.

BY E. C. BULEY.

CHAPTER 1

A RICH STRIKE.

“This about finishes the water/' said Dan Prescott to his mate, Gordon Wetherby, as he painfully scooped the dregs of muddy fluid from the water hole into a kerosene tin by using a pint pot as a baler. “Dead finish all right,” the other gold seeker agreed. “We’ll need all that’s left in the other hole for drinking.”

They slung the two full tins of water on a pole, and, shouldering it, walked with the burden up the slope of Feathertop Hill, taking care not to spill any of the precious fluid. The camp of these two Australian gold-seekers was far out in the NeverNever country, 200 miles from the nearest, cattle station. The camp consisted of a gunyah, or shelter of boughs, under which the ramshackle motor car, which had carried them so far, was preserved from the worst of the direct rays of the blistering sun. A smaller lean-to of the same nature served as an open-air bedroom. The rest of the camp was a log fire, over which some primitive cooking utensils dangled from a crossbar. By the foot.of Fethertop Hill ran Leopardwood Creek, now a chain of depleted waterholes, connected by a dry bed of hot stones. During the brief rainy season of North Australia this creek was fed from some underground river or lake, which gushed out like a spring at the foot of the hill. During the long dry season the creek subsided, first into a string of pleasant waterholes; and then, as evaporation proceeded, into a dry creek bed. The dry season was now well advanced, and there was very little water left.

The two prospectors, clad in dusty moleskins, with strong beards on their tanned faces, set. doggedly to work with the last, of the water. Dan Prescott carried his can to a mark set on the hillside and washed dish after dish of the surface soil, working steadily uphill, Wetherby, beginning at a parallel mark some distance away, pursued the same process. Each tin dish the men washed out showed the bare colour of gold, but gave no reward worth labour. The prospectors did not expect immediate reward; they had been toiling for more than two months with a more substantial object. They had found these signs of gold at the foot of the hill, and, within certain bounds, up the slope of it. The higher they went the narrower the bounds within which the golden prospects were found. The inference was one familiar to every gold seeker. Somewhere near the hilltop was a store of gold, from which these tiny grains had been washed by the rains of centuries. The gold had been washed downhill, spreading out fanwise as it went. By tracing the outer spokes of the fan uphill to the point where they joined the gold seekers might eventually find the source of the gold.

It might be an alluvial pocket, or it might be a lode of golden ore. A pocket would yield rich nuggets; but they hoped for a lode of ore. If they found anything like that, they would own a. mine. It was just the place, Dane Prescott said, for a rich find of quartz, veined with gold. They worked on, until the water in tlieir tins was nothing but thick mud. Then, as the sun was sinking in the west, they drove in pegs to mark the limit of tlieir toil, and shambled wearily down to their camp. Tea, damper, a tin of bully beef apiece and a. big raw onion wore discussed in silence. Then pipes were lit, the fire was raked together, and in the still dark of a desert night they smoked over the camp fire. “I’ll take a line on my side,” Dan said suddenly. “From the pegs at the bottom, through those higher up, up to the pegs I drove to-day.” “Only thing to do,” Gordon Wetherby agreed. “I’ll do the same. Then we’ll continue our two lines until they meet.”

“And dig there,” Dan agreed. “Only thing 1o do.’

“Pity the water gave out,” murmured his mate.

“Can’t be helped,” Dan yawned. “G’night.” Five minutes later the pair were snoring.

Early next morning they were busy with stout cord, running a line up the hillside to define the fan-shaped area over which the gold had been washed. At the apex of that fan, if their work was accurate, they ought to find the source of the gold. They worked, as gold-seekers do, like men possessed of tireless strength and inexhaustible energy.

Their operations brought them to a spot where the hillside reared itself almost perpendicularly for a height of some ten feet. Here the two converging lines met. Dan, the gold-seeker of experience, regarded this scarp with a kindling eye.

“Looks good to me,” he said; “gimme the pick.” Dry sand fell away in gushes from his attack on the hillside. Ilis mate Don laboured furiously with a longhandled shovel, casting the stuff aside. They had not; been working very long when the point of the pick entered something more solid than loose earth, something which hold it fast. Dan gave a jerk, and the pick came away, bringing with it some lumps upon which the two men flung themselves with feverish intentness. “Quartz!” gasped Dan Prescott; “And rotten with gold. Shot through and through with it. Gimme that shovel.” They were both gasping now with the work and the excitement. Their faces were working strangely. In a few minutes Dan had laid bare the outcrop of a quartz reef. The stone was so brittle that they could break it with their hands; but wires of yellow gold ran through and through it, holding it together. “Don,” said Prescott, with a funny giggle. “Shake on it! Our blooming fortunes are made!” They took out a generous supply of the golden stone, as much as they could carry on two or three trips down to the camp. Then they set to work on the hillside above their find, 1 browing down earth and sand enough to cover up the face from which the stone had been taken. (To Be Continued).