the good world!
“it was only a blast,” said lambert, smiling down into the white face his flickering lamp disclosed to him. “let us go up to the face of the room and see it.”
the four lights ahead had reappeared again and were bobbing about distractedly, and as they went forward toward them through a cloud of acrid smoke, she saw two men rapidly filling a mine car, while the other two were busy setting a new prop under the roof. these last two were the master-miners, her guide told her, and she watched them with interest while they set a post of hard wood upright and secured it in place by driving a broad wedge between it and the roof.
“that big wedge gives the post more purchase on the roof, you know,” lambert explained. “see, the car is full; it holds a little over a ton.”
the two laborers pushed it down the track to the foot of the chamber, where a driver-boy would pick it up on his next trip out.
“every car has a tag on it to show which room it comes from,” went on the superintendent, “and when it gets outside, the coal is weighed and credited to the men who mined it. the men usually work in pairs,—butties, they call them,—and each man has a helper whom he has to pay out of his earnings. that’s the reason so many of the men make their boys work for them.”
the props needed to support the roof were set, the coal brought down by the blast cleared out of the way, the dirt and debris scraped to one side, and the two miners looked carefully over the wall of coal before them and held a little consultation. then one of them removed his lamp from his cap and lay down on his side, and with a sharp pick began to cut in the coal a deep horizontal groove about a foot above the floor. the other miner lighted him at his work, and when he grew tired, as he soon did because of the strained position, changed places with him.
“we might as well go,” said lambert, at last. “there won’t be anything more to see here for a good while. they’ve got to cut that groove about two feet deep all the way across the face before they can begin blasting again. you see, the bottom layer of coal is slaty, and the powder needed to blast it out would break the good coal above it into little bits. so they take out the good coal first. that’s just one of the tricks of the trade—there’s a thousand more.”
he was busy guiding her safely down the chamber, and mr. bayliss, left to his own devices, suddenly found himself stumbling wildly over the high caps in which the wooden rails of the track were laid. lambert rescued him, laughing, and they reached the foot of the room just in time to see a driver-boy bring in his mule, hitch it to the loaded car, pull it out to the main track, and attach it to his trip. the door closed behind them instantly as they went out.
“what is the door for?” asked miss andrews.
“to keep the air-current from going along that entry. if it wasn’t closed, the current would take a shortcut through there back to the airway, and the rooms farther on wouldn’t get any. the door shuts off the in-current, and so the air doesn’t get to those rooms over there till it’s on its way out.”
“and how many of these rooms are there?”
“we’re working about thirty now.”
“with four men in each one?”
“yes; there’s nearly a hundred and fifty men and boys at work. we’ve worked out about a hundred rooms to the right, here, drawn back the ribs, and closed them up.”
“‘drawn back the ribs’?”
“yes; you see, when the rooms are first opened we have to leave pillars about twelve feet thick between them to hold up the roof. well, when the seam has been worked out to the limit, or as far as we can go profitably from the main entry, we take out these pillars, too, before we close up the working. that’s called ‘drawing back the ribs.’”
“but you said the pillars were needed to hold up the roof.”
“they are.”
“then when you take them out doesn’t the roof fall?”
“it does sometimes,” said lambert, grimly, “but we do the work as quickly and carefully as we can, and put in a lot of extra posts. it’s dangerous, i admit, but it has to be done, or there wouldn’t be much profit in coal-mining. you see, miss bessie, our rooms are only twenty-one feet wide—that’s as wide as it’s safe to make them. well, if we leave walls twelve feet thick between them, we lose over one third of the coal in the mine. and remember that every ton of this last third can be got out without any additional initial expense—for gangways, tracks, tipple, and so on, you know. we can’t afford to waste all that; if we did, we’d lose our profit and would have to shut up shop.”
she did not answer, but walked along beside him, deep in thought. it seemed such a savage irony that men must risk their lives in order to render the business profitable!
“there is the opening into the old part of the mine,” said lambert, pointing to a tight door upon which had been painted in great flaming letters.
“does that mean there’s a fire in there?” she asked.
“well,” said her guide, “there isn’t any fire there now, but there probably would be—and a big explosion, too—if anybody went through there with a lighted lamp. we blow the place out every once in a while,—the law compels us to,—but in those old workings the fire-damp collects pretty fast.”
“i’ve heard stories about fire-damp ever since i’ve been old enough to read the newspapers,” she said. “what is it, mr. lambert?”
“the chemists call it light carbureted hydrogen; most people know it as ‘marsh-gas,’ because you can see it bubbling up whenever you stir the water of a marsh; but the miner calls it ‘fire-damp.’ there’s a lot of it in coal, especially soft coal, and after every blast more or less of it is released. if the air-current is good, this is blown away before it can do any harm. if the ventilation is bad, the gas collects gradually at the top of a room. pretty soon it will get low enough to touch the flame in one of the lamps, and then usually there is a big explosion which wrecks all that part of the mine. if there isn’t enough of it to explode, it catches fire and rolls back and forth across the roof, and if the miners aren’t burnt to death, they’re pretty likely to be suffocated by the after-damp.”
“that’s another word.”
“yes; after-damp or choke-damp is only the miner’s word for the carbonic-acid gas generated by the combustion of fire-damp. it is heavier than atmospheric air, and so settles at once to the floor of the room. two breaths of it will cause death, and the miner who has thrown himself on the floor to protect himself from the fire hasn’t much chance unless he gets up and out pretty quickly.”
miss andrews drew a long breath of dismay.
“and is that all?” she asked at last.
“oh, no”; and the superintendent laughed at her tone. “there are other kinds. there is white-damp, more deadly than either of the others, but much less common; and even coal-dust itself forms a very violent explosive under certain conditions. the one great protection against them all is perfect ventilation—only mighty few things are perfect in this world, and mine ventilation isn’t one of them. but here i’m yawping away like a man on a lecture platform; aren’t you getting tired of listening?”
“no, indeed!” she answered warmly, and they went on along other entries, into other rooms. everywhere the same nerve-straining, muscle-tearing toil was in progress; blast followed blast; the coal was carried away, out to daylight—the first daylight it had ever seen; everywhere was the rumble of the cars, the shouts of the driver-boys.
“so you have been through a coalmine,” said her guide, when he had brought them at last back to the entrance. “there’s not many women in this great country can say as much. and now i’ll have to leave you—mr. bayliss is a pretty fair guide for the open air. will you ride down?”
“no, thank you,” she said. “we’d prefer to walk, i think. and sometime i’ll thank you properly for your kindness; just now i’m too dazed, too astonished by it all, to think clearly.”
“that’s all right,” he said, laughing. “i’ll bet i enjoyed it more than you did”; and waving his hand to them, he turned back into the mine.
they went slowly down the path along the mountain-side, breathing in deep drafts of the pure, sweet air, looking about with new delight on the beauties of hill and valley.
“oh, mr. bayliss,” she burst out at last, “i never before quite realized what a good, beautiful world it is!”
“no,” he answered, smiling at her emotion and understanding it; “i think it would do most of us good to spend an hour in a coal-mine now and then, if only for the joy of coming out.”
“but to stay there!” she said, with a little shudder. “to labor there day after day—it is too horrible!”
“it is horrible,” he assented, quite grave now. “yet it is difficult to see how it can be avoided. the world needs coal, just as it needs iron and lead and silver and many other things which must be dug up out of its depths.”
“but the world is so selfish!”
“yes; it certainly rewards very poorly the men who do this labor for it. yet i think that in a few more years mining will be no more dangerous than any other manual labor. every year, almost, some new step is taken to lessen its dangers, and i believe i shall live to see the time when every mine will be lighted from end to end with electricity, and the hardest part of the work will be done by steam, or compressed air, or some other power.”
“let us hope so, at least,” she said fervently, “and in the meantime—”
“yes?”
“and in the meantime do all that we can to make up for the world’s selfishness.”
“yes—by being patient and helpful; that is just what you have been here. i have seen it and rejoiced in it, miss andrews.”
she looked away from him with a little gesture of protest, but he did not heed her.
“and i know,” he went on, “that you can understand something of the feeling and purpose that kept me here for those four years before you came; you know i had practically no success at all till then.”
“oh, yes, you had!” she cried. “you had done so much! i think the field was ready.”
“for instance,” he went on quietly, “i should never have found tommy remington.”
“i did not find him—he came to me of his own accord.”
“i had been here four years, but he never thought of coming to me. and no doubt there are many others who will come, as time goes on—though, i fancy, few quite like him. i have great hopes for him.”
“yes—i know; and so have i. and i am sure we are not going to be disappointed—”
“since jabez smith has made the way so smooth for us.”
“what a splendid man he is!” she cried. “who would have thought that here—in this place—”
she looked about her at the sordid details of the scene,—the grimy cabins, the piles of slack,—and left the sentence uncompleted. but she had proved for herself one great and hopeful truth—that no corner of the world is so small or mean but that love and helpfulness may be found there.
