Read "Delilah of the Snows" by Harold Bindloss online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Supper had just been finished, and Ingleby was lying, pipe in hand, beside the creek waiting until Leger should bring another load of wash-dirt from the mine. The sunlight was still pleasantly warm, the air filled with the balsamic odours of the pines, and there was a little smile of unalloyed content in Ingleby's face as he drank them in. Though he had toiled since morning, those few minutes would be the only rest he would enjoy until long after darkness closed in, and once more he indulged in visions of a roseate future as he made the most of them.
They had washed up each bucket-load as they brought it to the surface, and the result had made the richness of the mine increasingly plain. Ingleby was getting accustomed to the fact that he was now, in all probability, at least, comparatively rich, and already his brain was occupied with half-formed projects. They did not include a further course of prospecting, for he had discovered that placer mines are addicted to playing out with disconcerting rapidity, and that in case of the deep lodes it is not as a rule the man who records the claim, but the capitalist or company-jobber, who takes the profit.