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.
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.'