Aster Wood and the Child of Elyso (Book 4) by J. B. Cantwell

Author:J. B. Cantwell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: J. B. Cantwell
Published: 2015-07-02T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

We arranged with the man, whose name turned out to be Carl, that we would work together to get the gold from the other side, then split the resulting riches. For a moment I considered whether this was a good idea or not. He seemed massive compared to the rest of us, and Sean was at least as big as Mom already. I guessed that they could probably defeat us all at once if it came down to a fight over the gold. But something in Carl’s dark eyes calmed my fears. I trusted him. It was gut instinct.

He was quite a swimmer, himself, though he had let Mom be the one to take the initial risk. But his big size and strength meant that he could be the one to swim back and forth across the lake with the stones as she broke them free from the mountain. Within each, paper-thin veins of gold cut through the rock. He piled them one by one on our side of the shore, stopping to show me the pit he had dug into the rock where we had found him pounding the sledgehammer.

“You gotta grind it all up,” he explained, showing me how to use the weight of the hammer to help put more force into bashing the rocks. “Then, you can fish the gold out.”

He explained the basics of gold mining when done without the heavy machinery of modern times. First, the rock needed to be crushed into near dust. Then, using a pan and a bucket of water, one could gradually sift through the remaining tiny granules, the gold eventually settling onto the bottom and the rock particles floated out of the pan. It was intriguing to me that riches such as gold could be found amongst stones that showed little evidence of the gold within. But I balked at the weight of the sledgehammer.

“Can’t you just melt it out or something?” I asked. I hadn’t exactly been looking for such a physically demanding task.

“Nope,” he said, turning to walk away.

And that was it.

I set to work, trying to attack my task with the same ferocity that Mom was bashing at that wall on the other side of the cavern. But after a half hour of pounding the sledgehammer into the ground, my fingers throbbed and my arms ached from the effort and the constant impact of the hammer against the rock.

Sean had set to work a few feet away from me, and I stood up now to see how our accomplishments stacked up against each other. There was no comparison. He had ground easily twice as much ore as I had in the same amount of time, and he had barely broken a sweat doing it. He smirked in my direction, an arrogant, superior air about him. I scowled.

I may have had an instinct to trust his father, but this kid was irritating. I silently hoped I didn’t start to come off like him as I got older. It was annoying.

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