Is your claim near? You live on it--I think you said?"
But that the little listener was so preoccupied with the stranger, this
suggestion of Uncle Ben's having a claim worth the attention of that
distinguished presence would have set him thinking; the little that he
understood he set down to Uncle Ben's "gassin'." As the two men moved
forward again, he followed them until Uncle Ben's house was reached.
It was a rude shanty of boards and rough boulders, half burrowing in one
of the largest mounds of earth and gravel, which had once represented
the tailings or refuse of the abandoned Indian Spring Placer. In fact
it was casually alleged by some that Uncle Ben eked out the scanty "grub
wages," he made by actual mining, in reworking and sifting the tailings
at odd times--a degrading work hitherto practised only by Chinese, and
unworthy the Caucasian ambition. The mining code of honor held that a
man might accept the smallest results of his daily labor, as long as he
was sustained by the prospect of a larger "strike," but condemned his
contentment with a modest certainty.
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