Chapter 176 Gold Melon-Seeds

The stray young bull dawdled off in the direction the herd had gone.

Once they found their salt place south of the Greywalls, they ought not to come back — ought they? Lora felt a melancholy she couldn't put a name to.

They went back to the mud-hole where the young bull had bathed. That stretch ran near the mountain's foot, gentler ground, and the mud beside the stream lay deep; Old Whelan and his son walked to the water first to read it.

The stream ran clear — but though the autumn sun stood high, water out of the hills was already cold as a knife.

The sunlight got in the way of reading the bed: everything bottom-side glittered, and no placer gold showed. Lora picked up a few bright little pebbles and called it a morning's wages.

They worked up along the stream. It ran as if it had split the forest into two halves, and there was no road — but the climbing wasn't hard for all that.

Near noon the young ladies were all giving out, and happily that was the moment the stream ducked under the trees. They had barely come to the woods' edge when Corin, walking point, sprang forward with a whoop:

"Haha — got you!"

Lora looked ahead: two great birds, crested fine as parade plumes, were tearing along the ground in a dead panic, then went up with a clatter of wings.

Ruth laughed outright. "And you dared lay hands on THAT bird?"

Sure enough, Corin — beaming one instant — stood stock-still the next, let the bird go, and fell to cursing: "What did it eat — dung? That rank!"

"It's the Old Stinker. She goes about with a reek on her feathers, lives in the stone cracks and the tree hollows, never clears her own droppings — a walking stink — till even the snakes and the weasel-spirits won't eat her," said Ruth, explaining behind her hand.

Oh — so that was the one. The hoopoe's ill name had been running ahead of it for a thousand years and more.

Corin beat at his clothes, sniffed at his own sleeve, and gagged all over again; the whole party roared — it seemed a hand too quick for one's own good has its drawbacks.

"My lady — past the trees we're near the summit. If we follow the stream and it shows nothing, we'll have to quarter off to a new bearing..."

Old Whelan hadn't finished; his son and Lora seemed to catch something at the same moment. The young Whelan stepped into the stream, and Lora walked toward the grass where Corin had pounced on the hoopoes.

"Leon — look!"

Lora pulled up a whole grass, root and all, and came trotting back to him, grinning: "And do you know its name?"

This grass ran in one great sheet from the stream-side to the wood's edge — Corin had landed square in it, and the green of its bruised leaf-juice was still stain on his lapel.

"That — that's knitbone. We're forever in the hills; break a bone sometimes — set it, and bind this grass on the outside of it," said Lorne Chase, who knew the plant. It grew thin on the mountains by the Cliff Sanctuary, and the physicians prized it dearly — who'd have thought to find it here by the field's worth.

Lora nodded. "Mending bones is only half of it: for a blade-cut, burn the dried grass to ash and dust it in the wound — it helps the flesh close. But mind, it's poison — to horses above all. A horse pasture must never carry this grass."

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Poison grass, then — and Leon gave it a second look. But Lora kept her eyes on him, and her smile went deeper, eyes curving crescent — just as they had that day over the cotton:

"For it has another name — the asking-grass. Where it spreads in one whole sheet, there is very often gold underneath!"

"The asking-grass? Then why not the gold-asking grass! I've seen the look of it round our East Manor, now I think — you mean there's gold there too?" The thing looked familiar to Norton; field-edge and path-side, he'd surely met it.

"First this ground has to be mining ground — on a mine, it loves to grow just over the gold." It was all book-knowledge, any road; Lora had no hands-on practice of her own.

Just then the young Whelan, ten paces out in the stream, waved and called:

"I've found it!"

Found it? Everyone surged over. From his son's hand Old Whelan took — as carefully as an egg — a flake smaller than a fingernail, held it up in the sun, studied it; and his weathered face creased into a smile:

"There's gold in this mountain. That is gold sand."

The one small grain passed to Lora's palm. Under the sun it gave back the shine that only metal gives.

"That's a big one, mind, by panning standards. We call the like 'gold melon-seeds'; the bigger ones, 'gold broad-beans.'"

As he talked, Old Whelan shrugged off the sieves and baskets he carried, and his son was already sieving the gravel off the streambed.

Corin picked up that gold grain and bit it. Lyle asked him: "Well? Any tooth in it?"

"No tooth in it — gold: tasty! Care for a bite yourself?"

Gold on the first climb of the day, and delight ran through them all; even the elephant was forgotten. The young lady was past understanding — says there's no book of secrets; is she a goddess, then?

Lorne Chase and the men he'd brought went down into the stream behind Old Whelan to learn the panning of gold sand. Leon drew Lora off to sit in the grove — before she could get excited and kick off her shoes and wade straight in.

The noon woods held still, but nobody had any weariness in them. Ruth and Lucy squatted at the west side, trying their own luck at finding gold sand.

And this wasn't the end of it, either: Lora still meant to find that "cave the men of old had dug." That was the whole of her mark.

Placer gold is the easiest come by, but the yield runs small. The vein gold under this ground ran to tens of tons — and lay buried too deep; leave that for the grandchildren to mine.

What she wanted was the cave the placer gold had washed out of — and that alone would be enough.

They were resting yet when Nansen came back. He had gorged himself full on elephant-watching — only he'd no sugar and no salt on him, else the creature might even have let him ride.

"He went off east, eating as he went, and twice or three times he tried to circle back. If we could ride beasts like that to war, who'd stand against us? One pass, one trampling — your city gates come off their hinges." He was still living in the dream of it.

Lyle handed him the gold grain off his own fingers: "Here — have a gold melon-seed, and cool your head."

"Gold? Where from?"

"Are your eyes planted on your backside? You didn't see them panning in the stream?"

"Out of the stream? Say so sooner — I took them for washing their feet. If there's gold, I'm in too!" Nansen kicked off his shoes and was splashing into the water toward Corin before the words died.

"Out of it! You'll muddy your granddad's water!"

No enthusiasm outlasts stream-water that cold: half a watch, and they were all out — with, by some marvel, a small palmful of gold sand. Old Whelan's wrinkles were all smile:

"No one's ever washed this ground. What shows on the surface already runs to melon-seed and broad-bean size. Follow the stream, find the cave it runs out of — a gold rock that washes down chunks like these won't be the only one."

From here on, Old Whelan was on his own ground. Lorne Chase and Corin went with him to hunt the gold-bearing cave, and Leon took Lora and the others to pick their way down.

This one trip had paid past all reckoning: gold found in hand, rock salt to be found by following the herd — and the open-cast coal now a matter of blowing the chaff to find the rice, any day at all.

"None of which needs the two of us. Linn and Lorne Chase will carry it; send more men to watch the panners, buy up the waste land and the fields round about, sow it to grass and raise horses. If anyone marks it, why — a horse pasture has been built, that's all. It isn't a capital crime."

"And if you buy the farmers' fields — don't they end up with nowhere to stand?"

Leon folded her two hands in his:

"What I can promise you is: we will help them all we can. But the ground on every side must be ours and ours only — for besides the horses there's the training of men on that ground, and the panning...

The mercy we show today becomes the cruelty they show us tomorrow."

"I know."

"Little goose." Leon gathered her in. The river boat swayed on the current, and Lora's weariness spread and spread like a stain; Leon watched her long lashes, her face gone peaceful, and let out a breath that only he could hear:

These things you would call cruel — best you never come to know of them at all.