Part 13

At the end of the week I was given a companion, or 'buddy.' Our lockers in the wash-house were near together, and we usually went down on the same hoist; but some mornings I would find Jim ahead of me, waiting by the scale-house. Jim rarely took the full benefit of the wash-house privileges, and morning found him with the dirt and grime of the work of the previous day still on his face. He was a Greek, short, with a thin, black moustache, which drooped down into two 'rat-tail' points. Around each eye a heavy black line of coal-dust was penciled, as though by an actor’s crayon. His torn black working clothes, greasy with oil dripped from his pit-lamp, hung on him like rags on a scarecrow.

From the scale-house we walked up the now familiar entries in 'third west-south' to the room where we worked, and dug out our picks and shovels from under a pile of coal where we had hidden them the night before. Then, in the still, close air of the silent room, we began each morning to fill the first car.

Down in the scale-house, where the cars were hauled over the scales set in the track, before being dumped into the bins between the rails, Old Man Davis took the weights; and when the loader’s number--a small brass tag with his number stamped upon it--was given to him, he marked down opposite it the pounds of coal to the loader’s credit; and so each day on the great sheet, smooched with his dusty hands, stood a record of each man’s strength measured in tons of coal.

When Jim and I worked together, we took turns hanging our numbers inside the car; and each night we remembered to whose credit the last car had been; and the next morning, if my number had been hung in the last car of the day before, Jim would pull one of his tags out of his pocket and hang it on the hook just inside the edge of the empty car. Then, he on one side and I on the other, we worked, shovelful after shovelful, until the coal showed above the edge. And then came the 'trimming' with the great blocks that had to be lifted and pushed with our chests and arms up on the top of the filled car.

Time went slowly then, for we could load a car together in less than an hour; and sometimes it took an hour and a half before the 'gathering' motor would come grinding up into the room to give us an 'empty.' In those long half-hours we would sit together on a pile of coal-dust beside the track and try to talk to each other.

Jim was a Greek, and from what I was able to gather, he came from somewhere in the southern part of the peninsula. I remembered a little Homer, and I often tried stray words on him; but my pronunciation of the Greek of ancient Athens was not the Greek of Jim Bardas; and although he recognized attempts at his own tongue and oftentimes the meaning of the words, it was not until we discovered a system of writing that we began to get along. Mixed in with the coal that had been blasted down by the shot-firers the night before, we occasionally found strips of white paper from the cartridges. We always saved these and laid them beside our dinner-pails; and when the car was filled and we had sat down again in the quiet beside the track, we would take our pit-lamps out of our caps and, rubbing our fingers in the greasy gum of oil and coal-dust that formed under the lamp-spout, we would write Greek words with our fingers on the white strips of paper.

Jim knew some English: the word for coal, car, loader--and he learned that my name was Joe, and called me 'My friend,' and 'buddie.' Then sometimes, after the fascination of writing words had worn away, we would sit still and listen to the gas or for the approach of the motor; and sometimes, when the wicks in our lamps had burned low, I would take out of my pocket the round ball of lamp-wick, and, like old women with a skein of yarn, we would wind back and forth, from his fingers to my own, sixteen strands of lamp-wick; and then, tying the end in a rude knot and breaking it off, stick the skein of wick down the spout of the lamp until only the end remained in sight. Next, lifting the little lid on the top, we would fill the body with oil, shaking it until the wick was thoroughly soaked so that it would burn.

III

To the ear accustomed to the constant sound of a living world, the stillness of a coal-mine, where the miles of cross-cuts and entries and the unyielding walls swallow up all sounds and echo, is a silence that is complete; but, as one becomes accustomed to the silence through long hours of solitary work, sounds become audible that would escape an ear less trained. The trickling murmur of the gas; the spattering fall of a lump of coal, loosened by some mysterious force from a cranny in the wall; the sudden knocking and breaking of a stratum far up in the rock above; or the scurry of a rat off somewhere in the darkness--strike on the ear loud and startlingly. The eye, too, becomes trained to penetrate the darkness; but the darkness is so complete that there is a limit, the limit of the rays cast by the pit-lamp.

There is a curious thing that I have noticed, and as I have never heard it mentioned by any of the other men, perhaps it is an idea peculiar to myself; but on days when I entered the mine, with the strong yellow sunlight and the blue sky as a last memory of the world above, I carried with me a condition of fair weather that seemed to penetrate down into the blackness of the entries and make my pit-lamp burn a little more brightly. On days when we entered the mine with a gray sky above, or with a cold rain beating in our faces, there was a depression of spirits that made the blackness more dense and unyielding, and the lights from the lamps seemed less cheerful.

Sometimes the roof was bad in the rooms, and I soon learned from the older miners to enter my room each morning testing gingerly with my pit-lamp for the presence of gas, and reaching far up with my pick, tapping on the smooth stone roof to test its strength. If the steel rang clean against the stone, the roof was good; but if it sounded dull and drummy, it might be dangerous. Sometimes, when the roof was weak, we would call for the section boss and prop up the loosened stone; but more often, the men ran their risk. We worked so many days in safety that it seemed strange that death could come; and when it did come, it came so suddenly that there was a surprise, and the next day we began to forget.

I had heard much of the dangers that the miner is exposed to, but little has been said of the risks to which the men through carelessness subject themselves. Death comes frequently to the coal-miners from a 'blown-out shot.' When the blast is inserted in the drill-hole, several dummy cartridges are packed in for tamping. If these are properly made and tamped, the force of the explosion will tear down the coal properly; but if the man has been careless in his work, the tamps will blow out like shot from a gun-barrel, and igniting such gas or coal-dust as may be present, kill or badly burn the shot-firers. The proper tamping is wet clay, but it is impossible to convince the men of it, and nine out of ten will tamp their holes with dummies filled with coal-dust (itself a dangerous explosive) scooped up from the side of the track. Again, powder-kegs are sometimes opened in a manner which seems almost the act of an insane man. Rather than take the trouble to unscrew the cap in the head of the tin powder-keg and pour out the powder through its natural opening, the miner will drive his pick through the head of the keg and pour the powder from the jagged square hole he has punched. And these are but two of the many voluntary dangers which a little care on the part of the men themselves would obviate.

A mine always seems more or less populated when the day-shift is down; for during the hours of the working day, in every far corner, at the head of every entry and room, there are men drilling, loading, and ever pushing forward its boundaries. At five o’clock the long line of blackened miners which is formed at the foot of the hoisting-shaft begins to leave the mine; and by six o’clock, with the exception of a few inspectors and fire-bosses, the mine is deserted.

The night-shift began at eight, and it was as though night had suddenly been hastened forward, to step from the soft evening twilight on the hoist, and, in a brief second, leave behind the world and the day and plunge back into the darkness of the mine.

We were walking up the track from the mine-bottom toward six west-south--Billy Wild, Pat Davis, two track-repairers, and I. As we turned the corner by the run-around, there came suddenly from far off in the thick stillness a faint tremor and a strong current of air. The 'shooters' were at work. For a quarter of a mile we walked on, stopping every once in a while to listen to the far-off 'boom' of the blasts that came through the long tunnels, faint and distant, as though muffled by many folds of heavy cloth. We pushed open the big trappers' door just beyond where First and Second Right turn off from the main entry, and came into the faint yellow glow of a single electric lamp that hung from the low beamed roof.

Beside the track, in a black niche cut in the wall of coal, two men were working. A safe twenty feet from them their lighted pit-lamps flared where they were hung by the hooks from one of the props. Round, black cans of powder tumbled together in the back of the alcove, a pile of empty paper tubes and great spools of thick, white fuse lay beside them. We sat down on the edge of the track, at a safe distance from the open powder, and watched them as they blew open the long, white tubes and with a battered funnel poured in the coarse grains of powder, until the smooth, round cartridge was filled, a yard or two of white fuse hanging from its end. In fifteen minutes they had finished, and one of the men gathered in his arms the pile of completed cartridges and joined us in the main entry.

A few minutes later, as we neared the heading, a sudden singing 'boom' came down strongly against the air-current and bent back the flames in our pit-lamps. Far off in the blackness ahead, a point of light marked the direction of the tunnel; another appeared. Suddenly, from the thick silence, came the shrill whine of the air-drills. A couple of lamps, like yellow tongues of flame, shone dimly in the head of the tunnel, and the air grew thick with a flurry of fine coal-dust. Then, below the bobbing lights appeared the bodies of two men, stripped to the waist, the black coating of dust that covered them moist with gleaming streaks of sweat.

'How many holes have you drilled?' yelled Wild, his voice drowned by the scream of the long air-drill as the writhing bit tore into the coal.

There was a final convulsive grind as the last inch of the six-foot drill sank home, then the sudden familiar absence of sound save for the hiss of escaping air.

'All done here.'

Slowly the two men pulled the long screw blade from the black breast of the coal, the air-hose writhing like a wounded snake about their ankles. The driller who had spoken wiped his sweaty face with his hands, his eyes blinking with the dust. He picked up his greasy coat from beside the track and wrapped it around his wet shoulders.

'Look out for the gas!' he shouted. 'There is a bit here, up high.'

He raised his lamp slowly to the jagged roof. A quick blue flame suddenly expanded from the lamp and puffed down at him as he took away his hand.

In the black end of the tunnel six small holes, each an inch and a half in diameter and six feet deep, invisible in the darkness and against the blackness of the coal, marked where the blasts were to be placed. On the level floor, stretching from one wall of the entry to the other, the undercut had been ground out with the chain-machines by the machine-men during the afternoon; and as soon as the blasts were in and the fuses lighted, the sudden wrench of these charges would tear down a solid block of coal six feet deep by the height and depth of the entry, to fall crushed and broken into the sump-cut, ready for the loaders on the following morning.

Selecting and examining each cartridge, the shooters charged the drill-holes. Two cartridges of black powder, tamped in with a long copper-headed rod; then dummies of clay for wads, leaving hanging like a great white cord from each charged drill-hole a yard of the long, white fuse.

We turned and tramped down the tunnel and squatted on the track a safe fifty yards away. Down at the end of the tunnel we had just deserted, bobbed the tiny flames of the lights in the shooters' pit-caps. There was a faint glow of sparks. 'Coming!' they yelled out through the darkness, and we heard them running as we saw their lights grow larger.

For a minute we silently waited. Then, from the far end of the tunnel, muffled and booming like the breaking of a great wave in some vast cave, came a singing roar, now like the screech of metal hurled through the air, and the black end of the tunnel flamed suddenly defiant; a solid square of crimson flames, like the window of a burning house; and a roar of flying air drove past us, putting out our lights and throwing us back against the rails.

'It’s a windy one,' yelled Wild. 'Look out for the rib-shots.'

Like a final curtain in a darkened theatre, a slow pall of heavy smoke sank down from the roof, and as it touched the floor, a second burst of flame tore it suddenly upward, and far down the entry, the trappers' door banged noisily in the darkness. Then we crept back slowly, breathing hard in an air thick with dust and the smell of the burnt black powder, to the end of the tunnel, where the whole face had been torn loose--a great pile of broken coal against the end of the entry.

Often, bits of paper from the cartridges, lighted by the blast, will start a fire in the piles of coal-dust left by the machine-men; and before the shooters leave a room that has been blasted, an examination must be made in order to prevent the possibility of fire.

All night long we moved from one entry to another, blasting down in each six feet more of the tunnel, which would be loaded out on the following day; and it was four in the morning before the work was finished.

It was usually between four and five in the morning when we left the mine. As we stepped from the hoist and left behind us the confining darkness, the smoky air, and the sense of oppression and silence of the mine below, the soft, fresh morning air in the early dawn, or sometimes the cool rain, seemed never more refreshing. One does not notice the silence of a mine so much upon leaving the noise of the outer world and entering the maze of tunnels on the day’s work, as when stepping off the hoist in the early morning hours, when the world is almost still: the sudden sense of sound and of living things emphasizes, by contrast, the silence of the underworld. There is a noise of life, and the very motion of the air seems to carry sounds. A dog barking half a mile away in the sleeping town sounds loud and friendly, and there seems to be a sudden clamor that is almost bewildering.

IV

It is natural that a mine should have its superstitions. The darkness of the underworld, the silence, the long hours of solitary work, are all conditions ideal to the birth of superstition; and when the workmen are drawn from many nationalities, it is again but natural that the same should be true of their superstitions.

One night when Carlson, the general manager, was sitting in his office, there was a knock at the door, and two loaders, from the Hartz Mountains, came into the room, talking excitedly, with Little Dick, the interpreter. Their story was disconnected, but Carlson gathered the main facts. They had been working in the northwest corner of the mine, in an older part of the workings, and on their way out that afternoon, as they were passing an abandoned room, they had noticed several lights far up at its heading. Knowing that the room was no longer being worked, and curious as to who should be there, they had walked up quietly toward the lights. Here their story became more confused. There were two men, they insisted, and they were certain that they were dwarfs. They had noticed them carefully, and described them as little men, with great picks, who were digging or burying something in the clay floor at the foot of one of the props. A sudden terror had seized them, and they had not delayed to make further investigation; but on the way out they had talked together and had decided that these two strange creatures had been burying some treasure: 'a pot of gold,' one of them argued.

Carlson was interested. The questions and answers grew more definite and more startling. The two men whom they had seen were certainly hump-backed. They were wielding enormous picks, and one of the loaders believed that he had seen them put something into the hole. Then came their request that they might be allowed to go back that night into the mine, and with their own tools go to this abandoned room and dig for the buried treasure. It was against precedent to allow any but the night-shift into the mine; but superstitions are demoralizing, and the best remedy seemed to be to allow them to prove themselves mistaken. An hour later they were lowered on the hoist; and all that night, alone in the silence of the mine, they dug steadily in the heading of the abandoned room; but no treasure was discovered. All the next night they dug; and it was not until seven nights' labor had turned over a foot and a half of the hard clay of the entire heading that they abandoned their search.

It is the custom of the men, when they leave the mine at the close of the shift, to hide their tools; and the imaginations of the loaders, worked upon by eight hours of solitary work, had doubtless seen in the forms of two of their companions who were hiding their shovels the traditional gnomes of their own Hartz Mountains.

In another part of the mine another superstition was given birth that led to a more unfortunate result. This time it happened among the Croatians, and, unfortunately, the story was told throughout the boarding-houses before the bosses learned of it, so that one morning a great section of the mine was abandoned by the men.

Up in the headings of one of the entries--so the story went--lived the ghost of a white mule. As the men worked with the coal before them, and the black emptiness of the tunnel behind, this phantom mule would materialize silently from the wall of the entry, and with the most diabolical expression upon its face, creep quietly down behind its intended victim, who--all unconscious of its presence--would be occupied in loading his car. If the man turned, and for even a fraction of a second his eyes rested upon the phantom, the shape would suddenly disappear; but if he were less fortunate, and that unconscious feeling of a presence behind him did not compel him to turn his eyes, the phantom mule would sink his material teeth deep into the miner’s shoulder; and death would follow. It was fortunate, indeed, that the only two men who had been visited by this unpleasant apparition had turned and observed him.

Perhaps it had been the sudden white glare cast from the headlight of a locomotive far down the entry, or perhaps it had been entirely the imagination, but, at all events, a man had come from his work early one afternoon inspired with this strange vision, and the next day another man also had seen it. The story was noised around, and two days later the men stuck firmly to their determination that they would not enter that part of the mine.

Fortunately for the superintendent, a crowd of Bulgarians had just arrived from East St. Louis, seeking employment. The Croatians were sent into another part of the mine to work, a mile from the haunted entries, where there were no unpleasant ghosts of white mules to disturb their labors; and so long as the mine remained in operation, there is no further record of the unpleasant ramblings of this fantastical animal; at least, none of the Bulgarians ever saw it.

With the mule came the ghost of a little white dog; but for some curious reason, although the dog was reported by many to have run out from abandoned rooms and barked at the men as they stumbled up the entry, but little attention was paid to it, and it seemed to possess no particularly disturbing influence.

There were many Negroes in the mine and they, too, had their 'h’ants' and superstitions; but these were of a more ordinary nature. In Room 2, third west-south, a sudden fall of rock from the roof had caught two miners. Tons of stone had followed, and in a second, two men had been crushed, killed, and buried. Death must have been instantaneous, and months of labor would have been required to recover the bodies, which were probably crushed out of human resemblance; but even years after this happened, Room 2 was one that was carefully avoided by all the Negroes, and if it ever became necessary for one of them to pass it alone, he would always go by on the run; for back under the tons of white shale that came down straight across the room-mouth the ghosts of Old Man Gleason and another, whose name was forgotten, still remained--immortal.

It was to prevent the establishment of such superstitions that the shift was always called off for the day if a man was killed in the mine; and in the morning, when the men returned to their work, the boss of the section in which the unfortunate miner had met his death took particular care to place several men together at that place, in order that no superstition might grow up around it.

WOMAN’S SPHERE

BY S. H. KEMPER

'WILBUR, dear,' said Aunt Susan, 'Rosa is very busy with the washing this morning, and if you will go down into the garden and gather this basket full of peas and then shell them for her to cook for dinner, I will--' Aunt Susan paused to reflect a moment, then continued, 'I will give you a new ball for a birthday present.'

Aunt Susan smiled kindly at the flashing look of intense joy that Wilbur lifted to her face as he seized the basket she was holding out to him.

'I--I’d just love to have it!' he exclaimed.

He was quite overcome with emotion, and tore away toward the garden at top speed.

Wilbur’s mother was ill, and Wilbur had been sent to visit Aunt Susan in order that the house might be quiet. Aunt Susan was really Wilbur’s father’s aunt. She was grandma’s sister, and she was very old. Grandma was not old. Her hair was white, but it went in nice squiggles around her face, and she wore big hats with plumes and shiny, rustly dresses, and high-heeled shoes. And when she kissed you she clasped you in a powerful embrace against her chest. Grandma was not old. But Aunt Susan, with her smooth gray hair and her wrinkled face and spectacles, her plain black dress and little shawl, and her funny cloth shoes, seemed to Wilbur a being inconceivably stricken of old. You felt intensely sorry for her for being so old. You were so sorry that you felt it inside of you; it was almost as if your stomach ached. And she was always kind and gentle. You felt that it would be a grievous thing to hurt her feelings or trouble her in any way.

Wilbur’s birthday came on Thursday and this was only Monday. A long time to wait. Wilbur needed a ball very badly. He had made friends with a number of boys here in Aunt Susan’s town, and the baseball season was at its height. Wilbur’s friends owned several perfectly worthy bats and two or three gloves, but there was a serious lack of balls.

That afternoon, joining the boys on the vacant lot where they played, Wilbur informed them with great satisfaction of Aunt Susan’s promise.

'My aunt is going to give me a new ball on my birthday,' he said to them.

They were more than pleased with the news. Wilbur found himself the centre of flattering interest. He told them that he guessed it would be a regular league ball.