Theodore Seixas Solomons

“ Aleck McAdams, for some years his friend and occasional companion; and Mr. Alfred Lawrence Turner, a thirty-year-old mining engineer, rather down on his luck. It was a scoured watershed country—eroding to a new “base level,” as Turner put it, with little of the older gravels left. But old Nock Whipple had told them as much, though, in different language. What hadn’t been washed away, old pals had said, was sometimes gold bearing. A “pockety” country, hard to get to, and the pockets too rare to tempt any but bold men desperate for a grubstake. ”

“ It was a pothole shielded by the angular, overhanging rim rock of the creek channel from the denuding forces of erosion that elsewhere had swept the highlands clean of all its old deposits. It had been known as a “pockety” country, as old Whipple had told them. Hereabouts there was one pocket. All that was mortal of Enoch Whipple rested there. The mining engineer and the old sour dough returned to the gold-flecked grave.
Alfred Lawrence Turner’s mouth twitched. He lit one of the last of his cigarettes.
“We won’t find as easy a place for a new grave,” he remarked thoughtfully. ”

“ McAdams scowlingly flipped his thumb at the epitaph.
“Didn’t you write that there po’try to skeer the next man off from tamperin’ with the grave? Maybe the next guy, even if he ain’t got the decency of a pig to let a grave alone, will be scairt out by the curse.”
“Oh, of course,” returned the engineer, ironically. ‘Prospectors are that way. Men that have got the nerve to take their lives in their hands in a wilderness like this—they’re going to be scared off by a verse they can’t even understand. With gold glittering under their hands. Why not advertise it? ”

“ Outside of the tent lay two pack saddles, canvas bags, a few prospecting tools. On the bare slope of the stream valley, two old mules, that had been sleek enough some months before, but were now skin-covered skeletons, browsed philosophically on frost-dried herbage.
McAdams browsed for dead willow sticks in drift litter under the banks of the creek. ”

“ Did he intend later to return and take it all?
“It’s all right, this sentimentality—for that’s what it is—mere mawkish sentimentality. If you can afford it! Why we’d be just plain fools if we went off without it!”
McAdams had recourse to the grimy bandanna. He mopped his brow.
“Any man can work,” he answered doggedly. “He don’t have ter rob graves. I ain’t superstitious, Turner. But it’s durn funny old Whipple dies with them words on his lips: ‘In a grave that’s decked with gold.’ An’ here he is in a grave full of it. ”

“ After we’ve washed the gravel—cleaned out this pothole completely—why, we can reinter the body and cover it with the tailings. Make it look just as it did——”
McAdams gasped.
“What d’yer mean? Dig him up again? You’re joking!”
Turner laughed uncomfortably. “Of course, if it had been lighter, we’d have seen that this was pay dirt. And naturally we’d have washed it out. Just because it was too dark to see——”
“But we _buried_ him!” exclaimed Aleck McAdams. “This ain’t no placer dump. This is a grave. Grave of my old pal. What the devil are we? Body snatchers? Ghouls?” ”

“ If there’s anything in sperits, maybe the old man’s hovering around and laughin’ to beat the dickens. Struck it at last—when it can’t do him no good!”
“It’s an excellent joke, no doubt,” returned the engineer unsmilingly. “But the real joke would be on us if we left thousands of dollars—after all the hardships we’ve gone through this summer. Left it for the next couple of prospectors to wash up and put it in their buckskin pokes. ”

“ Growed a beard to look like a sure-enough Western man. An’ every day while we was all splittin’ up, this guy—they called him Willie—would set up a little lookin’-glass against a tree and comb out his whiskers and slick up his long, wavy, brown hair. ”