Part 12

Victoria laughed joyously. 'I’m not a little girl. I’m a woman. And, mother, Jim is so good. He wants to be married right away. He says he can’t bear to think of waiting. But he said I was to tell you that if you couldn’t spare me for a while, it would be all right.'

There was pride in her lover’s generosity. But deeper than that was the woman’s pride in the knowledge that he could not 'bear to think of waiting.'

'It isn’t that I can’t spare you, dear,' said her mother. 'But, O Victoria, I’d wanted to have you go off and study to be a fine musician. I’ve dreamed of it ever since you were born.'

'But I couldn’t go even if it wasn’t for Jim. Where would we ever get the money? Anyway, mother, Jim is going to buy me a piano. What do you think of that?'

'A piano?'

'Yes. He has been saving money for it for years. He says I play too well for an old-fashioned organ. And on our wedding trip we’re going to Chicago, and we’re going to pick it out there, and we’re going to a concert and to a theatre and to some show that has music in it.'

In spite of herself, Emmeline Black was dazzled. In all her life she never had gone to the city except in her dreams. Until that far-off day of magic when Victoria should be a fine musician, she had never hoped to replace the squeaky little organ with a piano.

'He says he has planned it ever since he loved me, and that has been nearly always. He says he can just see me sitting at the piano playing to him nights when he comes in from work. I guess, mother, we all have to have our dreams. And now Jim’s and mine are coming true.'

'Have you always dreamed things, too?' asked her mother.

It did not seem strange to her that she and this beloved child of hers had never talked about the things which were in their hearts until this night. Mothers and daughters were like that. But there was a secret jealousy in knowing that they would not have found the way to those hidden things if it had not been for Jim Forman. It was he, and not she, who had unlocked the secrets of Victoria’s heart.

'Why, yes, of course, mother. Don’t you remember how you used to ask me what was the matter when I was a little girl, and would go off sometimes by myself and sit and look across the fields? I didn’t know how to tell you. I didn’t know just what it was. And don’t you remember asking me sometimes if I was sick or if somebody had hurt my feelings, because you’d see tears in my eyes? I’d tell you no. But some way I couldn’t tell you it was because the red of the sunset or the apple trees in blossom or the crescent moon, or whatever it happened to be, made me feel so queer inside.' She laughed, but there was a hint of a sob in her voice. 'Isn’t it strange, mother, that we don’t seem able to tell folks any of these things? I couldn’t tell you even now, except that I always had an idea you’d felt just the same way, yourself. I seemed to know I got the dreams from you.'

'Hush,' warned her mother. 'There’s some one coming. Oh, John, is that you?'

'Yes. Why don’t you two go to bed?' answered the boy. 'It’s getting late, and there’s lot to do to-morrow.'

'It is bed-time, I guess,' said his mother. 'Run along, Victoria. And sweet dreams.'

She cautioned John and his sister not to wake the others, as they prepared for bed. She walked into the house. She tried the clock. Yes, Jake had wound it. She locked the door. She folded her mending neatly and put it away. She placed Minnie Jackson’s letter in the drawer of the table. She took the picture of St. Cecilia and balanced it on the little shelf above the organ, where had been a china vase with dried grasses in it. She stood off and looked at it critically. She decided that was the very place for the picture. She looked around the room for a place to put the vase, and made room for it on top of the little pine book-case. She walked to the table and hunted in the drawer until she found pen and ink and a piece of ruled paper.

'Dear Minnie,' she wrote in her cramped, old-fashioned hand, 'I was so glad to get your note and the picture. I want to thank you for it. Can’t you come out right away and spend the day with me? I have so much to tell you, and I want that you should tell me all about yourself, too. You see I’m keeping the vow, just as you did, although we had forgotten it for so long. Isn’t it strange, Minnie, about things? Here I’d thought for years that my dreams were gone. And now it seems Victoria had them, all the time. It’s a secret yet, but I want to tell you, and I know she won’t mind, that Victoria is going to be married. You know Jim Forman, don’t you? Anyway, you knew Cy Forman and Milly Davis, and he’s their eldest child. I hope Victoria can keep the dreams for herself better than I did. Perhaps she can. She’s going to have things easier than I have, I hope. But if she can’t, surely she can keep them until she has a child to give them to, just as I gave mine to her. I never thought of it before, but it seems to me to-night that perhaps that is the surest way there is of having our dreams last. I don’t see how I’m going to stand it to see my girl growing fat and tired and old from hard work, like I’ve done. But there is another side to it. You’re a mother, too, Minnie, so I guess I don’t need to tell you that all the music and all the pictures in the world wouldn’t make up to me, now, for my children. We didn’t know that when we had our "fancies," did we? But we know it now. Come out soon, Minnie. We’ll have so much to talk about, and I want that you and Victoria should know each other.'

She folded the paper and slipped it into an envelope which she addressed and stamped. Then she blew out the light.

A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE

BY JOSEPH HUSBAND

TEN days after my graduation from Harvard I took my place as an unskilled workman in one of the largest of the great soft-coal mines that lie in the Middle West. It was with no thought of writing my experiences that I chose my occupation, but with the intention of learning by actual work the 'operating end' of the great industry, in the hope that such practical knowledge as I should acquire would fit me to follow the business successfully. That this mine was operated in direct opposition to the local organization of union labor, and had won considerable notoriety by successfully mining coal in spite of the most active hostility, gave an added interest to the work. The physical conditions of the mine were the most perfect that modern engineering has devised: the 'workings' were entirely electrified; the latest inventions in coal-mining machinery were everywhere employed, and every precaution for the safety of the men was followed beyond the letter of the law.

I

It was half-past six on a July morning when the day-shift began streaming out of the wash-house: some four hundred men,--white, black, and of perhaps twenty-eight nationalities,--dressed in their tattered, black, and greasy mine-clothes. The long stream wound out of the wash-house door, past the power-house where the two big generators that feed the arteries of the great mine all day long with its motive power were screaming in a high, shrill rhythm of sound,--past the tall skeleton structure of the tipple-tower, from which the light morning breeze blew black clouds of coal-dust as it eddied around the skeleton of structural iron-work,--to a small house at the mine-mouth, sheathed in corrugated iron, where the broken line formed a column, and the men, one by one, passed through a gate by a small window and gave their numbers to a red-faced man, who checked down in a great book the men who were entering the mine.

From the window we passed along to a little inclosure directly above the mouth of the main hoisting-shaft. Sheer above it the black tower of the tipple pointed up into the hot, blue morning sky; and the dull, dry heat of the flat Illinois country seemed to sink down around it. But from the square, black mouth of the shaft a strong, steady blast of cool air struck the faces of the men who stood at the head of the little column waiting for the next hoist. On the one side of the shaft-mouth, long lines of empty railroad cars stretched out beyond into the flat country, each waiting its turn to be filled some time during the day with coal that would come pouring down over the great screens in the tipple; and on the other side of the shaft-mouth, under the seamed roof of the building where the checker wrote down the numbers of the day-shift, sat the hoisting engineer--a scrawny, hard-faced man with a mine-cap pushed back from his forehead.

Beside him was the great drum on which the long steel cables that lifted and lowered the hoisting-cage were rapidly unwinding, and in his hand he held a lever by which he controlled the ascent or descent of the 'cage.' The first cage had been lowered, and as I watched him and the dial before him, I saw his hand follow his eye, and as the white arrow passed the 300-foot level, the hand drew back a notch and the long, lithe wire began to uncoil more slowly. Three hundred and fifty feet,--and another notch,--and as the arrow reached near the 400-foot mark, his foot came down hard on the brake, and a minute later a bell at his elbow sounded the signal of the safe arrival of the hoist. A minute, and another signal; and then, releasing his foot from the brake, and pulling another lever toward him, the drums, reversed, began to rewind; and as the arrow flew backwards, I realized that the cage was nearing the top--the cage on which a minute later I was to make my descent as a 'loader' into one of the largest, and perhaps most famous, of the vast soft-coal mines that lie in our Middle States.

As the thin cables streamed upward and over the sheave-wheels above the shaft and down to the reeling-drums, I looked at the men about me and felt a sudden mortification at the clean blue of my overalls, and the bright polish on my pick and shovel. A roar at the shaft-mouth, the grind of the drums as the brakes shot in, and the cage lifted itself suddenly from the shaft.

The cage, or elevator, in which the men were lowered into the mine, was a great steel box divided into four superimposed compartments, each holding ten men; and I stood, with nine others, crowded on the first or lowest deck. As the last man pushed into his place and we stood shoulder to shoulder, the hoisting engineer slowly slipped his lever again toward him, and as slowly the cage sank. Then, in an instant, the white-blue of the sky was gone, except for a thin crack below the deck above us, through which a sheet of white light sliced in and hung heavily in the dusty air of our compartment. The high song of the generators in the power-house, the choking puffs of the switch-engine in the yards, and the noise of men and work which I had not noticed before, I now suddenly missed in the absence of sound.

There was a shuffling of feet on the deck above, and again we sank, and this time all was darkness, while we paused for the third deck to fill. Once more--and again for the fourth. Then, as the cage started and the roar of the shoes on the guide-rails struck my ears, I looked at the men about me. They were talking in a whirr of foreign words; and in the greasy yellow light of their pit-lamps, which hung like miniature coffee-pots in the brims of their caps, the strong, hard lines of their faces deepened. The working day was begun.

As the cage shot down, the wall of the shaft seemed to slip up, and from its wet, slimy surface an occasional spatter of mud shot in on the faces of the miners. Strong smells of garlic, of sweat, and of burning oil filled the compartment, and the air, which sucked up through the cracks beneath our feet as though under the force of a piston, fanned and pulled the yellow flames in the men’s caps into smoking streaks. Then I felt the speed of the 'hoist' diminish. A pressure came in my ears and I swallowed hard; and a second later, a soft yet abrupt pause in our descent brought me down on my heels. The black wall of the shaft before me suddenly gave way, and we came to a stop on the bottom of the mine.

It was cool, and after the heat of a July morning, the damp freshness of the air chilled me. With dinner-pails banging against our knees, we pushed out of the hoist; and as the men crowded past, I stood with my back against a great timber and looked around me. Behind, the hoist had already sunk into the 'sump' or pit, at the bottom of the shaft, in order that the men on the second compartment might pass out into the mine; and a second later they swarmed by me--and still I stood, half-dazed by the roar of unknown sounds, my eyes blanketed by the absence of light, and my whole mind smothered and crushed.

I was standing just off the main entry or tunnel of the mine, which began on my left hand out of blackness and passed again, on my right, into a seeming wall of darkness. The low, black roof, closely beamed with great timbers, was held by long lines of great whitewashed tree-trunks. A few electric lights shone dimly through their dust-coated globes, and the yellow flames from the men’s pit-lamps, which had flared so bright in the compartment of the hoisting-cage, seemed now but thin tongues of flame that marked rather than disclosed the men.

Out of the blackness on the left, two tracks passed over a great pit and stretched on into the blackness on the right, as though into the wall of the coal itself. Then, far off, a red signal-light winked out and made distance visible; and beyond it came the sound of grinding wheels; there was the gleam of a headlight on the steel rails. The ray grew larger and two yellow sparks above it flamed out into pit-lights. A train was coming out of the entry and I waited until it should pass. With a grind of brakes it suddenly loomed out of the blackness and into the dull haze of light at the shaft-bottom. With a roar it passed by. The locomotive, a great iron box, was built like a battering-ram, the headlight set in its armor-plated bow, and behind, on two low seats, as in a racing automobile, sat the motorman and the 'trip-rider' or helper, the motorman with one hand on the great iron brake-wheel, the other on his controller, and the trip-rider swinging on his low seat, half on the motor and half over the coupling of the rocking car behind, clinging to the pole of the trolley. Their faces were black with the coal-dust,--black as the motor and their clothing,--and from their pit-lamps the flames bent back in the wind and streamed out straight along their cap-tops.

Low above the head of the trip-rider, the wheel on the trolley streaked out sudden bursts of greenish-white sparks along the wire; and as the train passed by, the roar of the locomotive gave place to the clattering of the couplings of the long string of stocky cars, each heaped high with its black load of coal. Some one seized me by the elbow.

'What’s yer number?' he asked.

'419.'

'Loader? New man?'

I nodded.

'Then come along with me.'

He was a tall, thin man, who walked with his head thrown forward and his chin against his chest as if in constant fear of striking the low beams overhead. I followed him, stumbling rather clumsily over the broken coal beside the track. The train had come to a stop over the pit between the rails, and men with iron bars were beating loose the frogs and releasing the hopper-bottoms of the cars. Heavy clouds of fine coal-dust poured up from the cars as the coal roared down into the bins; and the clanking of metal, the crash of falling coal, and the unintelligible shouting of the foreigners, filled the entry with a dull tumult of sounds.

Dodging the low trolley-wire which hung about five feet above the rails, we crawled across the coupling between two of the cars to the other side of the entry, and walked to the left, past the locomotive where the motorman was still sitting in his low seat, waiting to pull out his train of empty cars into the sudden darkness of the tunnel beyond. Then, for the first time, I learned that mines are echoless, and that sound--like light--is absorbed by the blotter-like walls of the tunnels.

We walked down the entry between the rails, and after a hundred yards turned with the switch in the track sharply to the right, and again on. Sense of direction or angles was lost, and, like the faces in a foreign race of people, where one can see little or no individuality, so here, each corner seemed the same, and in a hundred yards I was utterly lost. Above was the smooth, black roof; below, the ties and the rails; and on either side, behind the two long rows of props, the face of the coal-seam, which glittered and sparkled in the light from our pit-lamps like a dull diamond.

We talked a little. My companion asked me where I had worked before, how much I knew of mines, and a few other questions; and still we walked on, dodging the low wire that comes level with one’s ear, and stumbling over the layer of broken coal that lay strewn here and there between the rails.

The silence was like the darkness--a total absence of sound, rather than stillness, as my first impression of the mine had been that of an absence of light, rather than of darkness. The smoking lights in our caps seemed to press out through the blackness twenty feet around us, where the light disappeared and was gone. And always in front of us, out of the black darkness, the two long lines of props on either side of the track stepped one by one into the yellow haze of light and sank again into darkness behind us as we walked.

The air was cool and damp, but as we turned the last corner, the dampness seemed suddenly gone from it. It was warmer and closer. Here the track swerved up from one of the main tunnels into a 'room'; and at the end, or 'heading' of this room, which we reached a few minutes later, empty and waiting for its first load, stood one of the square cars which I had seen before at the mine-bottom and which we passed several times on sidings by the track. The car was pushed up to the end of the track and its wheels 'spragged' by two blocks of coal. Here the tunnel suddenly ended, and from the blank back 'face' a rough, broken pile of coal streamed down on both sides of the car and reared up before it against the roof.

'Just shovel 'er full, then wait till the motor takes her out and sends in an empty, and fill that one. I’ll look in on you once in a while and see how you’re getting along.'

Then he turned and walked down the track and left me in the dim light of my single pit-lamp.

II

In the first days of coal-mining--as in many mines to-day where modern methods have not superseded those of old-time miners--a man did all the work. With his hand-drill he bored into the face of the coal at the head of his room, or entry, and from his keg of powder he made long cartridges and inserted them into his drill-holes. Then, when the coal was blasted down, and he had broken it with a pick, he loaded it with his shovel into a car; and trimming square the face of the tunnel, propping when necessary, he pushed on and on until he broke through and joined the next tunnel or completed the required length of that single entry.

But to-day these conditions are, in most instances, changed. The work begins with the 'machine-men,' who operate the 'chain-machines.' In order that the blast may dislodge by gravity an even block of coal, of the dimensions of the cross-section of the tunnel, these men cut with their machines a 'sump-cut,' or, in other words, carve out an opening level with the floor, about six inches high and six feet deep, at the end of the tunnel. The machines--which are propelled by electricity--consist of a motor and a large oblong disk, about which travels an endless chain containing sharp steel 'bits' or picks. The machine is braced, the current turned on, and the disk advanced against the coal, automatically advancing as the bits grind out the coal. As soon as the machine has entered to the full six feet, the disk is withdrawn and the cut continued until it extends across the entire face.

In the evening the drillers, with their powerful air-drills, bore a series of five or six six-foot 'shot-holes,' four along the roof, and two on each side for the 'rib-shots.' Then a third crew of men, the 'shot-firers,' fill the deep drill-hole with long cartridges of coarse black powder, and blast down the coal, which falls broken and crumbled into the cut prepared by the machine-men. In the morning, when the ever-moving current of air, forced into the mine by the fan at the mouth of the air-shaft, has cleared away the dust and smoke, the loaders enter the mine, and all day long load into the ever-ready cars the coal that has been blasted down, until the 'place' is cleaned up, and their work is done. Then they move on to another 'place'; and so the work goes on in a perfect system of rotation.

My companion had told me, as we walked from the mine-bottom, that his name was Billy Wild. 'Call me Billy,' he said; and as we walked down the track to the main entry, he turned and called over his shoulder, 'You’re in Room 27, third west-south. That’s where you are, if you want to know.'

The light in my lamp was burning low, and I sat down on a pile of coal beside the track, lifted it out of the socket in my cap, and pried up the wick with a nail which one of the men 'on top' had given me for the purpose. Then I stripped to the waist and began to load, shovelful after shovelful, each lifted four feet and turned over into the waiting car, for two long hours, sometimes stopping to break with my pick great blocks of coal that were too large to lift, even with my hands. Then, finally, lumps of coal began to show above the edge of the car, and I 'trimmed' it, lifting some of the larger pieces to my knees, then against my chest, and then throwing them up on the top of the pile.

The noise of the shovel scraping against the floor and the clatter of the coal as the great pile slid down and filled each hole that I dug out at its foot, filled the tunnel with friendly sounds; but when the car was loaded and I slipped on my coat and sat down on a pile of fine coal-dust beside the track to wait, silence suddenly submerged me. I could hear my heart beat, and curious noises sang in my ears. Up in the roof, under the stratum of slate above the coal, came a trickling sound like running water--the sound of gas seeping out through the crevices in the coal. I was wet with sweat, and my face, hands, and body were black where the great cloud of dust which my shovel had created had smeared my wet skin. Dull pains in the small of my back caught me when I moved, and every muscle in my body ached. (In a week my hands had blistered, the blisters had broken, and over the cracked flesh ingrained with coal-dust healing callouses had begun to form.)

Then, far off in the distance, came a muffled, grinding sound that grew louder and louder--a sound that almost terrified. A dull, yellow light, far down in the mouth of the room, outlined the square of the tunnel; and then, around the corner came the headlight of the electric 'gathering' or switching locomotive, and above it, the bobbing yellow flames of two pit-lamps. With a grinding roar, the motor struck the upgrade and came looming up the tunnel, filling it with its bulk. There was sound, and the silence was gone. The coupling of the locomotive locked with the coupling of the waiting car, and they rumbled away.

Once more the locomotive came, this time with an 'empty' to be filled. In the old days, mules were used to 'gather' the loaded cars, and, in fact, are still employed in most mines to-day; but electricity permits bigger loads, and the dozen or two of mules that lived in the mine were used only where it was impossible to run the locomotives.