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12. Old Miss Mollie's Back She stood at the long counter fingering bolts of colorful calico and the sales clerk waited, watching her nervously. The old woman's homespun dress was ancient. Sleeves wide as buzzard wings flapped about her elbows, seams puckered where they had been resewn many times and the large deep pockets in the front of her skirt sagged. "Don't know which a these purty patterns I like best," she said, stroking a bolt of bright blue calico admiringly. The pattern on it was pink rosebuds. The clerk cringed for there was dirt in the creases of the roughened hand that caressed the fresh, clean material and the nails were jagged and split. It was a hot August day in 1834 and so still that not a sycamore leaf nor pine tree needle stirred on either side of the dirt road that was Auraria's main street. The sign in the window of S. T. Rowland's general store said "Cash or Gold." This poor old crittur' hasn't much of either went through the mind of Mr. Rowland's clerk, John Ragan, but he tried his best to be patient with her. "Mmn, mmn. Just look at them fine hankercheeves," she exclaimed, picking up first a satinett handkerchief and then a silk one. A small gasp of distress escaped Ragan's lips as the hands fresh from the red Georgia clay fondled a fine silken square from London. She raised the silk handkerchief and touched it lightly to her weathered cheek. Poor Ragan turned away unable to restrain a shudder. "My. Ain't it soft! Puts me in mind of a dress I once had when I was a girl. T'was the only time I felt I was beautiful." 138 Old Miss Mollie's Back 139 For a moment Ragan felt a stirring of sympathy as he looked at the bushy white eyebrows and weathered features. "I think I'll take this hankercheeve. How much air it?" she said, raising her eyes to his, and he gave her the price thinking that would be the end of it. To his surprise she reached into one of her sagging pockets, pulled out a scale and then a small chamois pouch. Thrusting a thumb and forefinger deep inside it she extracted some gold dust and he weighed it. He was about to reach for it to turn it into the metal box in which he kept the gold dust. "No, ye don't!" she exclaimed. "That's a mite over," and she retrieved a few flecks of her gold. "I'm sorry Miss ...""Just call me, Miss Mollie," said the old lady with faded blue eyes and gray hair streaked with chestnut. She gave him a faint snaggle-toothed smile, stuffed the gold pouch and paper sack into her pocket, and was gone. This was the first time he had seen her but it was not to be the last. Most often, he would look over under one of the hanging brass whale oil lamps that cast their golden circles in the darker recesses of the store to see her buying hoop cheese, dried beans, cornmeal, or fatback. But sometimes she would stop in the dry goods and her rough, chapped hands would finger the Turkey Red prints, ginghams, and bombazettes. He actually came to like her. "I ain't never had no dress that nice in my whole life and it sure would make me happy to have somethin' like that someday, even if it were just to be laid out in," she said with a wry grin. He wondered why she cared, for she didn't seem to pay much attention to clothes and always wore the same 138.134.107] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 05:28 GMT) 140. The Gold Seekers faded dress. Sometimes she would talk about one of the mines. "Have you heard what the gold yield is at Battle Branch Mine?" "No m'am. What is it?" "Why, they're gettin' a thousand dollars a bushel, Mister Ragan, that's what." Once he asked her how she knew so much about mining and she replied, "I don't. Before he died, my old man talked about the mines now an agin and I guess, I just larned it from him." "He worked at one of the mines, did he?' "Not after he got his legs hurt in the cave-in at the Calhoun. But after he come home...

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