In the Land of the Long White Cloud

you’re just as pretty as Ruben said.”
    “You’re a flatterer, Mr. Peters!” Fleurette said, laughing, and cast a glance at the structure Stue had just been working on. It consisted of a wooden sluice box that was lowered on posts and fed by a little waterfall.
    “That’s a gold sluice,” Ruben explained enthusiastically. “You fill it with soil, then let water flow through. It washes out the sand, and the gold gets stuck here in the gutter.”
    “Groove,” Stuart corrected him.
    Fleurette was impressed. “You know something about gold prospecting, Mr. Peters?” she asked.
    “Stue. Just call me Stue. Well, really I’m a blacksmith,” Stuart admitted. “But I’ve helped build something like this before. It’s really very simple, though the old miners down there want to make a science out of it. On account of the stream’s speed and all.”
    “But that’s nonsense,” Ruben agreed with him. “If something is heavier than sand, it will take longer to wash out; that’s just logical. Regardless of how fast the water flows. So the gold has to remain in here.”
    Fleurette did not agree. Given the rapid flow of the stream, the smaller grains of gold would be flooded out. But, of course, it depended on what size nuggets the boys were after. Maybe you could manage to sieve out the larger nuggets with this. So she nodded politely and followed the two of them back to camp. Stue and Ruben quickly agreed to take a break. Shortly thereafter, coffee was brewing in a primitive contraption over the fire. Fleurette took stock of the prospectors’ meager assortment of cookware. There was only a pot and two plates, and she had to share a coffee mug with Ruben. It did not look like a successful gold-mining operation.
    “Well, we’re just getting started,” Ruben said defensively when Fleur made a cautious remark to this effect. “We just laid out the claim two weeks ago and are building our first sluice box.”
    “Which would be going a lot quicker if Ethan, that highway robber in Queenstown, would sell us something other than bottom-of-the-barrel tools!” Stuart cursed. “Seriously, Fleur, we’ve worn out three saw blades in two days. And yesterday a shovel got bent out of shape. A shovel! Those things normally last your whole life. I have to trade out the shaft every other day, and it never quite fits into the shovel head. I don’t know where Ethan gets this stuff, but it’s expensive and doesn’t work.”
    “But our claim is pretty, don’t you think?” Ruben asked and looked wistfully at the banks of their stream. Fleur had to agree. But she would have found it prettier if she had also seen gold.
    “Who…um, advised you to make this claim?” she inquired cautiously. “I mean, it looks like you’re all alone here. Was it some sort of secret tip?”
    “It was intuition,” Stuart declared proudly. “We saw this place and—bingo! This is our claim. We’ll make our fortune here.”
    Fleurette frowned. “You mean…no one has found any gold in this area yet?”
    “Not much,” admitted Ruben. “But no one has looked either.”
    The two boys looked at her, expecting praise. Fleur forced a smile and decided to take matters into her own hands.
    “Have you at least tried panning for gold yet?” she asked. “In the stream, I mean. Didn’t you want to show me how that works?”
    Ruben and Stuart nodded simultaneously. “We’ve found a little bit that way,” they said, reaching for a gold pan.
    “We’ll show you how to do it and then you can pan a little while we continue working on the sluice box,” Ruben suggested. “No doubt you’ll bring us luck!”
    Since Fleurette surely did not need two teachers and Stuart wanted to give the two of them a chance to be alone, Ruben’s companion withdrew upstream. Over the next few hours, they did not hear a word from him—other than the occasional curse whenever another tool broke.
    Fleurette and Ruben used their first moment of seclusion to properly greet each other. They had to reestablish how sweet their kisses tasted and how naturally their bodies responded to one another.
    “Do you want to marry me now?” Fleurette finally asked drowsily. “I mean…I can’t really live here with the two of you unless we’re married.”
    Ruben nodded seriously. “True, that wouldn’t work. But the money…Fleur, I have to be honest. Up until now, I haven’t saved anything. The little that I earned in the Queenstown goldfields went toward our