When old Milt left the bank, he felt that no matter what came up he had nothing to fear from the law. People might find what he had called his freak deposit of placer, for plenty of evidence of where he had worked was there. Also, some gold—because he had scattered some through the gravel.
But how he had turned the golden ingots into nuggets was his own secret. Here his knowledge of assaying, chemistry, and mineralogy had come into play. He had known that the ingots from the Treasure Box would have their own special characteristics. They were fairly high-grade bullion. Placer gold would be lower grade. It nearly always contained some base metals.
He knew what the base metals usually were. So on his trips to Gold Palo, and one of the other camps, he had picked up all he needed to bring the precious metal down in value. This he had done by melting the bullion and mixing in the base metals in a furnace of his own construction, far back in the mountains, away from prying eyes.
Then he had poured the molten metal, little by little, into his coffeepot, filled with cold water. This had caused the gold to form into small, irregular pieces, somewhat resembling gold nuggets as found in a placer deposit. Still, this was not all. The granulations had had sharp edges, which had to be worn off so as to make them appear as if they had been ground between boulders, rocks, and pebbles.
To wear the edges off, Milt had taken his ten-gallon water keg, cut a hole in one end, large enough to admit the passage of an egg-sized stone, and partly filled the keg with round rock, pebbles, and water. Plugging the hole, he’d put the keg on a prepared frame and had revolved it by hand for hours at a stretch. The constant tumbling about with the rock and pebbles had so worn off the rough edges of the granulations that the latter had acquired every appearance of being placer nuggets. Later on, the gold had been washed clear of the debris and put in the canvas sacks.
Finally, old Milt, obliterating all signs of the furnace, had then headed boldly for Gold Palo. Like many another man, he had calculated that his very boldness would carry his scheme through. He never knew whether he had ever been under suspicion or not. Yet he felt satisfied that from now on he had all the money he really needed to keep himself and the burros in comparative ease for the remainder of their days.
The Third Western Megapack Page 64