A YEAR 
 
 IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 JOSEPH HUSBAND 
 
LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 Class 
 
A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 

 PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR 
 
A YEAR 
 IN A GOAL-MINE 
 
 BY 
 
 JOSEPH HUSBAND 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 $tt& Cambridge 
 1911 
 
H * 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY 
 COPYRIGHT, jpll, BY JOSEPH HUSBAND 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published April tqix 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. THE NEW MAN 1 
 
 II. LOADING COAL WITH A GREEK BUDDY . 17 
 
 III. AN UNDERGROUND CITY . . . .29 
 
 IV. DANGERS OF THE MINE .... 44= 
 V. MINERS' SUPERSTITIONS 63 
 
 VI. FIRE ........ 72 
 
 VII. THE DEADLY GASES . . . .85 
 
 VIII. FIGHTING FOR THE MINE . . " . . 101 
 
 IX. EXPLOSIONS . . ... . . 124 
 
 X. ROB CARR . . ... . .139 
 
 XI. THE TRAGEDY OF THE MINE . . .164 
 
 326763 
 
A YEAE IN A COAL-MINE 
 I 
 
 THE NEW MAN 
 
 TEN days after my graduation from 
 Harvard I took my place as an un- 
 skilled 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 learn- 
 ing 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 suc- 
 cessfully. That this mine was operated in 
 direct opposition to the local organization 
 of union labor and had won considerable 
 
/* : : YEARi LV A COAL-MINE 
 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 per- 
 fect that modern engineering has devised: 
 the "workings" were entirely electrified; 
 the latest inventions in coal-mining machin- 
 ery were everywhere employed, and every 
 precaution for the safety of the men was 
 followed beyond the letter of the law. 
 
 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 tat- 
 L tered, 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 
 
THE NEW MAN 3 
 
 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 skele- 
 ton of structural iron-work, to a small 
 house at the mine-mouth, sheathed in cor- 
 rugated 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, 
 
4 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 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 low- 
 ered the hoisting-cage were rapidly un- 
 winding, and in his hand he held a lever 
 by which he controlled the ascent or de- 
 scent of the " cage." The first cage had 
 
THE NEWJMAN 5 
 
 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 min- 
 ute later a bell at his elbow sounded the 
 signal of the safe arrival of the hoist. A 
 minute, and another signal; and then, re- 
 leasing his foot from the brake, and pull- 
 ing another lever toward him, the drums, 
 reversed, began to re-wind; 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 de- 
 scent as a " loader " into one of the largest, 
 and perhaps most famous, of the vast soft- 
 coal mines that lie in our Middle States. 
 
6 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 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 mortifi- 
 cation 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, on 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, 
 
THE NEW MAN 7 
 
 through which a sheet of white light sliced 
 in and hung heavily in the dusty air of our 
 compartment. The high song of the gen- 
 erators 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 dark- 
 ness, 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 hi 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. 
 
8 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 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 be- 
 neath 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 de- 
 scent 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 
 
THE^NEW MAN 9 
 
 against our knees we pushed out of the 
 hoist; and as the men crowded past me, 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 
 
10 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 yellow flames from the men's pit-lamps, 
 which had flared so bright in the compart- 
 ment 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 lo- 
 comotive, a great iron box, was built like 
 
THE NEW MAN 11 
 
 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 control- 
 ler, and the trip-rider swinging on his low 
 seat, half on the motor and half over the 
 coupling of the rocking car behind, cling- 
 ing 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 
 
12 A YEAR IN A COALHMINE 
 
 with its black load of coal. Some one 
 seized me by the elbow. 
 
 "What 's yer number? " he asked. 
 
 "Loader? Newman?" 
 
 I nodded. 
 
 " Come along with me." 
 
 He was a tall, thin man, who walked 
 with his head thrown forward and his chin 
 against his chest as though in constant fear 
 of striking the low beams overhead. I fol- 
 lowed 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 beat- 
 ing loose the frogs and releasing the hop- 
 per-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 
 
THE NEW MAN 13 
 
 foreigners, filled the entry with a dull tu- 
 mult of sounds. Dodging the low trolley- 
 wire which hung about five feet above the 
 rails, we crawled across the coupling be- 
 tween 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 
 
14 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 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 ques- 
 tions; 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 be- 
 tween the rails. 
 
 The silence was like the darkness a 
 total absence of sound, rather than still- 
 ness, 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 
 
A NEW MAN 15 
 
 blackness twenty feet around us, where 
 the light disappeared and was gone. And 
 always in front of us, out of the black dark- 
 ness, 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 min- 
 utes 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 sid- 
 ings by the track. The car was pushed 
 up to the end of the track and its wheels 
 " spragged " by two blocks of coal. Here 
 
16 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 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 '11 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 
 
 LOADING COAL WITH A GREEK BUDDY 
 
 IN the first days of coal-mining as in 
 many mines to-day where modern meth- 
 ods 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 tun- 
 nel, 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. 
 
18 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 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 the dimensions of the cross-section of 
 the tunnel, these men cut with their ma- 
 chines 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 con- 
 sist of a motor and a large oblong disk, 
 about which travels an endless chain con- 
 taining 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. 
 
LOADING COAL WITH A BUDDY 19 
 
 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 bro- 
 ken 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 per- 
 fect system of rotation. 
 
 My companion had told me, as we walked 
 
20 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 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 shoul- 
 der, "You're in Eoom 27, Third West 
 South. That 's where you are, if you want 
 to know." The light in my lamp was burn- 
 ing 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 
 
LOADING COAL WITH A BUDDY 21 
 
 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 sub- 
 merged 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 run- 
 ning 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 
 
22 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 muscle in my body ached. (In a week my 
 hands had blistered, the blisters had bro- 
 ken, and then over the cracked flesh in- 
 grained 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 terri- 
 fied. 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 " gath- 
 ering " or switching locomotive, and above 
 it, the bobbing yellow flames of two pit- 
 lamps. With a grinding roar, the motor 
 struck the up-grade 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 rum- 
 bled away. Once more the locomotive 
 
LOADING COAL WITH A BUDDY 23 
 
 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 
 min^ were used only where it was impos- 
 sible to run the locomotive. 
 
 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 
 
24 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 line of coal-dust was penciled, as though 
 by an actor's crayon. His torn black work- 
 ing clothes, greasy with oil dripped from 
 his pit-lamp, hung on him like rags on a 
 scare-crow. 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 
 
LOADING COAL WITH A BUDDY 25 
 
 great sheet, smootched 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 v pocket 
 and hang it on the hook just inside the 
 1 edge of the empty car. Then, he on one 
 side and I on the other, we worked, shov- 
 elful after shovelful, until the coal showed 
 above the edge. And then came the " trim- 
 ming" 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 
 
26 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 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 pro- 
 nunciation 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 
 I 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 
 
LOADING COAL WITH A BUDDY 27 
 
 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 words with our fingers on 
 the white strips of paper: avOpuiros, TTTTTOS, 
 
 Jim knew some English, the word for 
 coal, car, loader and he learned that my 
 name was Joe, and called me " My friend," 
 and " buddy." 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 
 
28 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 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. 
 
Ill 
 
 AN irNDEEGROUND CITY 
 
 was comparatively little gas in 
 the mine. Each morning, as we en- 
 tered our room, we made a rough test for 
 gas, for occasionally during the night 
 some door down in the entry was acci- 
 dentally left open and the air-current, 
 short-circuited, might fail to reach up into 
 the room and clean out the ever-generat- 
 ing gas. And so, as we left the entry, we 
 would take our lamps from our caps and, 
 walking one before the other, holding 
 them out before us and slowly lifting them 
 above our heads, watch to see if a sudden 
 spurt of blue flame from the pit-lamps 
 would disclose the presence of "fire- 
 damp," the most feared of all mine-gases. 
 
30 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 There is always some gas up under the 
 roof at the head of a room or an entry, 
 and when the cars were loaded we would 
 sometimes burn it out, holding our lamps 
 high up against the roof until the gas up 
 in the end of a drill-hole, or in a hollow 
 of a rock, burst suddenly into a soft blue 
 and yellow flame that puffed out against 
 the roof and down toward our hands. 
 There was never much of it, but once in a 
 while where the drill bored through into 
 a pocket, there was more gas than the 
 men anticipated; and twice I have seen 
 men come staggering down the entry, 
 holding their faces in their hands, when 
 the flame had swerved suddenly down and 
 caught them. We could always hear it 
 the trickling, like water running over peb- 
 bles; and sometimes, too, as we sat and 
 waited, we could hear far up in the strata 
 above a sudden crackling as the pressure 
 
AN UNDERGROUND CITY 31 
 
 of four hundred feet of solid stone bent 
 beneath its weight the supporting timbers 
 and pillars of coal that held up the roof of 
 the mine. Old miners call these noises the 
 " working " of a mine ; and often, where 
 the rooms were close together and the 
 walls of coal between them were thin, 
 there was a constant splintering sound and 
 louder noises that would bring us sud- 
 denly to our feet in a little panic of fear. 
 
 It is not the loading, nor the long hours 
 with the shovel and pick, that grind into 
 the brain; but it is the silence and the 
 waiting, the silence and then the sounds, 
 and then the silence again. 
 
 A coal-mine is a vast city in an under- 
 ground world. Beside the hoisting-shaft, 
 down which the men are lowered into the 
 mine and from which the coal is lifted in 
 great " skips," or more often in the mine- 
 cars themselves, there is the air-shaft. 
 
32 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 These are usually the 'only two connec- 
 tions between the mine and the outer 
 world. Shaft one, where we worked, was 
 about four hundred feet below the sur- 
 face, and comprised over seventy-five 
 miles of tunnels laid out by the engineers' 
 transit according to a perfect system for 
 the hauling of the coal and the ultimate 
 mining of the maximum quantity. From 
 the air-shaft to the hoisting-shaft ran the 
 main tunnel, or entry; and parallel and at 
 right angles with this tunnel ran other 
 entries, dividing the mine into great sec- 
 tions. 
 
 Down into the air-shaft, every hour of 
 the day and night, an enormous fan in the 
 fan-house at the top of the shaft pumped 
 air into the mine, and by means of many 
 doors, stoppings, and bridges or "over- 
 casts," this strong current of air passed 
 through every mile of tunneling, never 
 
AN UNDERGROUND CITY 33 
 
 crossing its own path and never stopping, 
 until it again reached the main entry, but 
 this time at the foot of the hoisting-shaft, 
 through which - fouled by the gases, the 
 dust, and impurities of the mine- it 
 poured out, a cold blast in summer, and in 
 winter a pillar of misty vapor that ascended 
 far into the structure of the tipple-tower 
 above the shaft-mouth. To keep this cur- 
 rent of air from taking the path of the 
 least resistance and "short-circuiting," 
 cutting off whole sections of the mine, 
 there was arranged a system of doors 
 which were opened to allow the trains and 
 the mine-cars to pass, and closed again 
 when they had gone through. As an addi- 
 tional precaution to take care of this life- 
 blood circulation, without which work in 
 the mine would be impossible, inspectors 
 whose duty it was to measure the 
 strength of the current, and to inspect the 
 
34 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 doors and stoppings to see that no part of 
 the mine escaped the cleansing draft 
 passed constantly from place to place, 
 testing for the presence of gas with their 
 safety-lamps, and ever measuring the vol- 
 ume and flow of the air-current. 
 
 And through all this vast system of 
 tunnels ran the great underground electric 
 railway, with its low-hanging wire, its 
 switching-stations, its sidings, and its main 
 belt-line. Small electric locomotives in the 
 various outlying sections of the mine 
 gathered the loaded cars from the rooms 
 where they were filled by the loaders, and 
 made up the trains on sidings near the 
 main belt-line. All day long the large 13- 
 ton locomotives gathered these trains and 
 dragged them past the scale-house where 
 Old Man Davis checked up the weight of 
 the loaded cars to each man's credit to 
 the great pit between the rails at the foot 
 
AN UNDERGROUND CITY 85 
 
 of the hoisting-shaft, where half-naked, 
 blackened Greeks beat open the hopper- 
 bottoms and dropped the coal down into 
 the waiting bins below. And from the bins, 
 with automatic regularity, giant buckets 
 or " skips " lifted the coal four hundred 
 and six feet upward to the open air, and 
 then fifty feet more to the top of the tip- 
 ple-tower, where like a tumbling torrent 
 it poured down over the sorting-screens 
 into the railroad cars beneath. 
 
 There were four hundred men on the 
 day-shift; and the loaders were, for the 
 most part, Bulgarians and Greeks. Few 
 spoke English, and few had been many 
 years in America. Some worked and saved 
 in order to return at a future day to the 
 Old Country and purchase with their earn- 
 ings an acre or two that would give them 
 a position in the little village of their birth. 
 Others plodded on, sending monthly re- 
 
36 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 mittances to their families and hoping 
 against hope that they too might some 
 day return. Others, with less strong ties 
 of home and country, spent their earnings 
 prodigally on gay clothes from the Com- 
 pany Store, and much beer in the evening 
 at the long boarding-houses half a mile 
 from the mine. 
 
 There was Big John, a huge Bulgarian 
 giant, who had figured that a dollar a day 
 was sufficient to give him all that life of- 
 fered. His great body was able to earn 
 twice that sum during the working day, 
 for we were paid entirely by piece-work, 
 and a loader, at the rate of twelve and a 
 half cents a ton, might earn as high as 
 $2.25 a day. But he was lazy, and learn- 
 ing that the only excuse for laziness was 
 sickness, each day at two o'clock in the 
 / afternoon, Big John presented himself to 
 Pete Christof alus, the " cage-boss," at the 
 
AN UNDERGROUND CITY 37 
 
 mine-bottom, and rubbing his stomach with 
 one hand, told him, " Me sick; thees place 
 no got steam, no can work," and demanded 
 
 f that he be allowed to leave the mine. There 
 were others who would work at night, in 
 addition to the day, if they were permit- 
 ted. An old Eussian and his son, who 
 would enter the mine on the earliest shift 
 in the morning, worked all day long, en- 
 raged and clamoring for cars if they did 
 not receive empties immediately, and some- 
 times the track-men on the night-shift 
 would find them loading all the empty cars 
 that they could find and leaving late at 
 night, to retire alone to the corner of the 
 room at the boarding-house in which they 
 
 f lived. 
 
 Once or twice on Greek Church days 
 the white starched kilts and braided jack- 
 ets of Macedonia gave color to the dingy 
 streets, and once came a half-dozen Egyp- 
 
38 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 tians who added their copper faces to our 
 medley of nations. The head men were 
 
 L Americans, Scotchmen, and Englishmen. 
 I can remember how " Uncle Jimmy " wept 
 on the Fourth of July when the band 
 played " Dixie," and how quiet steel-eyed 
 Sandy would take his fiddle (Harry Lau- 
 der had been in St. Louis that winter), and 
 marching up and down the little parlor of 
 his house, stroke out with no tender touch, 
 but with a wealth of feeling, " I Love a 
 Lassie." 
 
 " Little Dick," interpreter, spoke ten 
 tongues, and read Virgil. "When he was 
 drunk you might guess that he had been 
 once a gentleman, and that there was a 
 reason for his leaving Austria; dull so- 
 
 i briety vulgarized him. 
 
 In every tunnel ran the long, thin pipe 
 along the rail, through which came the 
 compressed air to drive the air-drills of 
 
AN UNDERGROUND CITY 39 
 
 the night-shift. The air in the room-head- 
 ings was supposed to be good enough for 
 men to work in if it was free from gas, 
 but sometimes when the smoke from the 
 pit-lamps and the smells of sweat and gar- 
 lic, and the fine clouds of coal-dust that 
 rose against the roof with every shovel- 
 ful, made it rank and choking, we would 
 take our picks, and working loose the 
 valve in the air-pipe, hold our hands and 
 faces in the strong, cool stream that seemed 
 to come, driven by an unknown power, 
 from a world above. 
 
 The temperature in a mine is about the 
 same, year in and year out; cool in sum- 
 mer, and warm in winter, in comparison 
 to the outer air; but when the exertion of 
 labor brought the sweat streaming out 
 from every pore, the water in our dinner- 
 buckets seemed sometimes almost too 
 warm to drink, and it was Jim who taught 
 
40 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 me to loosen the valve on the air-pipe and, 
 propping my dinner-bucket with a chunk 
 of coal against the vent, chill the water 
 with a blast of compressed air. 
 
 Day after day we loaded, and one day 
 when the great pile of coal that had been 
 shot down by the night-men had been 
 shoveled into the cars and dragged away, 
 and we had attacked the loosened blocks 
 at the head of the room with our picks, 
 there was a hollow sound, and a minute 
 later my pick struck through and we found 
 that we had broken into the heading of a 
 room driven from another entry in the op- 
 posite direction from ours; and half an 
 hour later we were talking to two Greeks 
 who had climbed through the opening. 
 
 Up in the wash-house, by a locker near 
 to my own, I often chatted with another 
 loader at the beginning or at the end of 
 the day. We went down on the same hoist 
 
AN UNDERGROUND CITY 41 
 
 one morning, and an hour later, as my first 
 car stood half-filled, the section boss came 
 tramping noisily up the track and told us 
 that the shift was called off. As we 
 reached bottom, a motor came grind- 
 ing down the track, and in the pale light 
 of the pit-lamps and the flashing green of 
 the trolleys, we saw a long, white bundle, 
 wrapped in the coarse canvas that is used 
 to build stoppings for the ventilation sys- 
 tem. It was the man whom I had known 
 in the wash-house the man who, an hour 
 before, had gone with me into the mine. 
 We had parted at the mine-bottom, and he 
 had gone up to his room, a half-mile from 
 the shaft; a room in which the track, turn- 
 ing from the main entry, ran up at a fairly 
 high grade to the heading. There he found 
 an empty car waiting for him one of the 
 great, heavy, square cars that stood ready 
 each morning to begin the day. Climbing 
 
42 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 up, perhaps to hang his brass tag inside, 
 he had kicked loose from under the wheel 
 the block of wood that held it, or perhaps 
 the weight of his body had moved the car; 
 at all events, it had become loosened and 
 had started down the track. Catching a 
 piece of wood in his hand, he had followed 
 it, vainly trying to block its wheels. At the 
 foot of the room, where it joined the main 
 entry at right angles, the track ran within 
 a few inches of the solid wall of coal. In 
 the darkness, the man had misjudged his 
 distance and the car had caught him be- 
 tween the coal and its side, and had passed 
 on. 
 
 That evening, as we walked home to the 
 boarding-house, we saw a dozen men walk 
 slowly from the Company Hospital carry- 
 ing on their shoulders a long white-pine 
 box. Perhaps he had hoped some day to 
 return to his village ; perhaps he sent 
 
AN UNDERGROUND CITY 43 
 
 monthly remittances to his family hi some 
 obscure town in the Croatian highlands ; or 
 perhaps he had come alone, seeking a for- 
 tune in a new land. 
 
IY 
 
 DANGERS OF THE MINE 
 
 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 si- 
 lence 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, loos- 
 ened 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 some- 
 where in the darkness strike on the ear 
 
DANGERS OF THE MINE 45 
 
 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 no- 
 ticed, and as I have never heard it men- 
 tioned 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. 
 
46 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 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 
 i 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 
 
DANGERS OF THE MINE 47 
 
 carelessness subject themselves. Death 
 comes frequently to the coal-miners from 
 a "blown-out shot." "When the blast is in- 
 serted 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 ignit- 
 ing such gas or coal-dust as may be pres- 
 ent, 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. 
 Eather than take the trouble to unscrew 
 
48 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 the cap in the head of the tin powder-keg 
 and pour out the powder through its nat- 
 ural 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 pop- 
 ulated when the day-shift is down, for 
 during the hours of the working day, in 
 every far corner, at the head of every en- 
 try and room, there are men drilling, load- 
 ing, and ever pushing forward its bound- 
 aries. 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 ex- 
 ception of a few inspectors and fire-bosses, 
 the mine is deserted. 
 
DANGERS OF THE MINE 49 
 
 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-repair- 
 ers, 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 " shoot- 
 ers " 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 tun- 
 nels, faint and distant, as though muffled 
 by many folds of heavy cloth. We pushed 
 open the big trappers' door just beyond 
 
50 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 where First and Second Eight 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. Bound, 
 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 
 
DANGERS OF THE MINE 51 
 
 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 coat- 
 ing of dust that covered them moist with 
 gleaming streaks of sweat. 
 
 "How many holes have you drilled?" 
 yelled Wild, his voice drowned by the 
 
52 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 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 ex- 
 panded from the lamp and puffed down 
 at him as he took away his hand. 
 
DANGERS OF THE MINE 53 
 
 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 under- 
 cut 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 dum- 
 
54 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 mies 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 tun- 
 nel and squatted on the track a safe fifty 
 yards away. Down at the end of the tun- 
 nel 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 crim- 
 son flames, like the window of a burning 
 house; and a roar of flying air drove past 
 
DANGERS OF THE MINE 55 
 
 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 the- 
 atre, a slow pall of heavy smoke sank 
 down from the roof, and as it touched the 
 floor, a second burst of flame tore it sud- 
 denly 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 
 
56 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 be made in order to prevent the possibility 
 of fire. 
 
 All night long we moved from one en- 
 try 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 ram, 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 tun- 
 nels on the day's work, as when stepping 
 off the hoist in the early morning hours 
 
DANGERS OF THE MINE 57 
 
 when the world is almost still: the sudden 
 sense of sound and of living things em- 
 phasizes, 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. 
 
 "We were walking down the north entry 
 one early morning and had just passed 
 through the last brattice door when Joe 
 Brass, one of the shot-firers, stopped, sud- 
 denly alert and silent, and held up his 
 hand. Sound means but little in a mine, 
 and eyes can but rarely detect danger. 
 
 " Do you smell anything ? " he asked. 
 
 We sniffed the cool air as it fanned past 
 us through the door that we still held 
 open. Almost imperceptible, a curious, 
 
58 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE; 
 
 foreign odor seemed to hang in the mov- 
 ing current. 
 
 " "Wood-smoke," said one of the men. 
 
 We turned and walked back and closed 
 the door behind us. The smell of the 
 smoke defined itself at we walked for- 
 ward. Through the next door it hung 
 strong in the air, and with it the oily smell 
 of burning coal. Then a light appeared 
 down the entry, and from its jerky motion, 
 we knew that the man was running before 
 we heard his feet clumping over the rough 
 ties. 
 
 " There 's a fire in Room 26," he yelled, 
 before we could see him. The word had 
 already reached bottom and as we paused 
 at the turning of the entry, trying to see 
 whether to turn to the right or the left, 
 there was a sudden roar behind us, and 
 the glow of a locomotive headlight. As 
 we waited, the locomotive came rattling 
 
DANGERS OF THE MINE 59 
 
 down the tunnel, half a dozen men crouched 
 low on its black frame, and behind it, on 
 a single flat car, the great steel water-tank 
 that was reserved for such emergencies. 
 Shouting questions, we swung on behind. 
 The motor followed the switch and turned 
 sharply down to the right. Through the 
 next door the smoke became suddenly 
 thick. A strong smell, almost as of burn- 
 ing oil; the heavy, pungent smell of soft 
 coal on fire. In the dead air of the entry 
 it hung still and motionless, like yellow 
 fog, and as we jumped off the truck and 
 ran down the entry behind the locomotive, 
 we crouched low to keep our eyes clear, 
 for there were still a couple of feet of clean 
 air along the bottom of the tunnel. From 
 ahead of us came the sound of voices and 
 then, through the smoke, we saw the lights 
 of the men, like yellow tongues of flame, 
 detached from their bodies, which were 
 
60 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 hidden in the thick blanket of smoke. The 
 coal in one of the rooms off the main en- 
 try which the shooters had blasted earlier 
 in the night was on fire, and the heat and 
 smoke were too intense to allow the men 
 to reach it with the water. Shouting at 
 each other in the blinding smoke and dark- 
 ness, with the dull, steady heat of the in- 
 visible fire bringing the sweat in streams 
 from our bodies, we worked to cut off the 
 room from the rest of the mine by build- 
 ing across its broad mouth, where it joined 
 the main entry, a solid stopping of wood 
 and plaster. A dozen men, in minute re- 
 lays, held a long strip of canvas against 
 the roof, while the rest of us pushed and 
 wedged into place between the floor and 
 the low roof, a string of props or posts 
 across the room mouth. As the smoke 
 thickened and the heat grew more intense, 
 the relays became shorter and we suddenly 
 
DANGERS OF THE MINE 61 
 
 dived from the dense, choking air above, 
 to lie flat along the floor, sucking in the 
 cool, clean air that lay above the water 
 beside the tracks. In half an hour we had 
 erected a long line of posts, with the can- 
 vas nailed against it ; and a temporary stop- 
 ping was effected. By that time a dozen 
 of the timbermen had arrived, and motors 
 had dragged up from the mine-bottom 
 piles of matched boards and sacks of wood- 
 fibre plaster. An hour more and the stop- 
 ping was reinforced with a solid fence of 
 boards and then, mixing the plaster in the 
 water beside the track and using our hands 
 as trowels, we caulked the seams, the 
 plaster drying quickly against the hot 
 boards. Three hours later the work was 
 done, and the air-current moving steadily 
 down the entry had blown away the last 
 shreds of the thick and choking smoke. 
 In the light of our lamps and lanterns, we 
 
62 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 again examined the long, white wall that 
 we had erected across the room-mouth. 
 A few more handfuls of plaster on cracks 
 through which a thin trickle of smoke still 
 puffed outward; and the work was done. 
 Two months later, when the fire, cut off 
 from the air of the mine, had smothered 
 itself to extinction, the wall was torn down, 
 the gas blown out, and work once more 
 resumed. 
 
MINERS' SUPERSTITIONS 
 
 TT is natural that a mine should have 
 JL 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 national- 
 ities, 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 discon- 
 nected, but Carlson gathered the main 
 
64 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 facts. They had been working in the north- 
 west 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 con- 
 fused. 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 
 
MINERS' SUPERSTITIONS 65 
 
 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 al- 
 lowed to go back that night into the mine, 
 and with their own tools go to this aban- 
 doned room and dig for the buried treas- 
 ure. 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 
 
66 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 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 tradi- 
 tional gnomes of their own Hartz Moun- 
 tains. 
 
 In another part of the mine another su- 
 perstition was given birth that led to a 
 more unfortunate result. This time it hap- 
 pened among the Croatians, and, unfortu- 
 nately, the story was told throughout the 
 boarding-houses before the bosses learned 
 
MINERS' SUPERSTITIONS 67 
 
 of it, and 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 ex- 
 pression upon its face, creep quietly down 
 behind its intended victim, who all un- 
 conscious of its presence would be oc- 
 cupied 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 
 

 68 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 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 loco- 
 motive 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 pail of the mine. 
 Fortunately for the superintendent, a crowd 
 of Bulgarians had just arrived from East 
 St. Louis seeking employment. The Croa- 
 tians were sent into another part of the mine 
 to work, a mile from the haunted entries, 
 where there were no unpleasant ghosts of 
 
MINERS' SUPERSTITIONS 69 
 
 white mules to disturb their labors; and 
 so long as the mine remained in operation 
 there is no further record of the unpleas- 
 ant 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 particu- 
 larly disturbing influence. 
 
 There were many negroes in the mine, 
 and they, too, had their " h'ants" and su- 
 perstitions; but these were of a more or- 
 dinary 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 
 
70 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 been crushed, killed, and buried. Death 
 must have been instantaneous, and months 
 of labor would have been required to re- 
 cover the bodies, which were probably 
 crushed out of human resemblance; but 
 even years after this happened, Eoom 2 
 was one that was carefully avoided by all 
 the negroes, and if it ever became neces- 
 sary 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 the next morning when 
 the men returned to their work, the sec- 
 tion boss of that section in which the un- 
 
MINERS' SUPERSTITIONS 71 
 
 fortunate miner had met his death took 
 particular care to place several men to- 
 gether at that place in order that no su- 
 perstition might grow up around it. 
 
VI 
 
 FIRE 
 
 IT was about six o'clock in the evening, 
 and the greater part of the day-shift 
 had left the mine. Out in some of the far 
 headings of the workings a few men re- 
 mained, finishing up their day's work, and 
 down in the motor-pits a dozen men were 
 overhauling one of the big electric loco- 
 motives. That day the skips had hoisted 
 from the mine an almost record tonnage. 
 The great underground city, its railroad 
 system, its entire plant, were in perfect 
 order; and, as is often the case, the 
 thought of disaster doubtless never oc- 
 curred to the men who still remained in 
 its black tunnels. 
 
 Old Man Davis, the scale-master, folded 
 
FIRE 73 
 
 up his report for the day and was walking 
 down the track toward bottom, when he 
 met a trackman who came running out 
 from a cross-cut between the main entries. 
 
 *s 
 
 " Mr. Davis! " he yelled, " come over this 
 way. I think I smell fire in C entry." Half 
 a dozen of us who were sitting on some 
 sacks of plaster, waiting for the hoist to 
 be lowered, jumped up and followed them 
 through the cross-cut and into the parallel 
 entry. It was a "return" for the air-cur- 
 rent, and the wind which came pressing 
 against us had passed through the whole 
 east section of the mine before reaching 
 us, and would carry on its current the 
 smoke of any fire that there might be in 
 that part of the mine. We stood on the 
 track for a minute and sniffed the dead, 
 warm air. No one said anything. Then we 
 walked down the track to where First and 
 Second West South turned sharply and at 
 
74 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 right angles to C entry. Again we stopped, 
 and here, of a sudden, strong on the air 
 came the soft, pungent smell of burning 
 wood. A half -hour before the last of the 
 miners had probably come out through 
 this entry, and in those scant thirty min- 
 utes whatever fire existed there must have 
 been ignited. 
 
 About a quarter of a mile down these 
 two entries, which ran on either side of a 
 third entry, or " air-course," was an " air- 
 split." Here the air from the third tunnel 
 was divided by a door, to pass in dimin- 
 ished volume to the right and to the left. 
 The air passing out of the air-course to 
 the left entered the entry known as Sec- 
 ond "West South, and as we neared this 
 spot the strong smell of the wood-smoke 
 that was already visible in the air told us 
 that the fire must be in the woodwork of 
 the air-split itself. Then suddenly the 
 
FIRE 75 
 
 smoke grew thick and enveloped us, and 
 mingled with the smell of burning wood 
 we caught for the first time the oily smell 
 of burning coal. The fire was in the air- 
 split and, fanned by the strong air-current 
 from the air-course behind it, the entire 
 framework and the door itself were in a 
 blaze, and around the walls on either side 
 and beside the track, the coal was already 
 glowing, a red ring of flame. 
 
 Defective wiring might have caused the 
 fire, but this was not likely; its location and 
 nature suggested another possibility, but 
 so immediate was the danger that investi- 
 gation was impossible, and its origin was 
 never conclusively explained. 
 
 So rapidly the fire increased that it was 
 now beyond our control with such means 
 of fighting it as were at hand, and, with- 
 out stopping, a dozen of the men turned 
 and ran back down the entry to get a 
 
76 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 motor and the water-carts. Meanwhile, the 
 entry became choking with the heavy 
 smoke. Down in the main bottom, at the 
 foot of the shafts, it now hung in the air 
 like a thin fog, and by the time that one 
 of the big motors came pushing a couple 
 of water-carts down the track, the men 
 at the top of the shafts had detected 
 the smell of smoke, and the alarm of fire 
 was sounded. 
 
 The suddenness of the fire, and the fact 
 that practically all of the men, and espe- 
 cially the head men, were at that time at 
 supper in the town, crippled the small 
 force who were endeavoring to stem its 
 rapid march down the entry. Coming 
 strong on the air-current, but a quarter of 
 a mile separated it from the mine-bottom, 
 the vitals of the mine. If the fire reached 
 here, all was lost. By the time the water- 
 carts had arrived, the volume of smoke 
 
FIRE 77 
 
 was so dense and the heat so intense that 
 their use seemed almost absurd, and imme- 
 diately an attempt was begun to connect a 
 hose line from the nearest water-pipes. It 
 was almost half an hour before the coup- 
 lings were made, and, blinded by the now 
 dense smoke, and half-scorched by the 
 heat of the flames, a dozen men endeavored 
 ineffectually to stem the advance of the 
 fire, which now lined the walls of the entry 
 like an open furnace. 
 
 For an hour it seemed as though they 
 were holding their own. Down at the 
 mouth of the entry a gang of timbermen 
 were already building a stopping across 
 the mouth of the entry, in case the men 
 with the hose-line found it impossible to 
 check the advance of the fire. Suddenly, 
 Tom Cox, who was holding the nozzle of 
 the first hose, sank to his knees, and in the 
 second that followed, four men beside him 
 
78 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 caught their hands to their necks and fell 
 beside him along the track. The water and 
 the fire had generated in the two hundred 
 yards of now burning entry a wall of the 
 invisible "white-damp," and this, driven 
 like the smoke by the air, suddenly over- 
 came the men who were fighting at the 
 edge of the flames. The question of life 
 and death now entered, for the fire un- 
 checked was rapidly marching down the 
 tunnel toward the bodies of the uncon- 
 scious men. From the mouth of the entry, 
 the timbermen, bending low to catch the 
 clean air below the smoke, fought up into 
 the heat and dragged out the bodies of 
 their unconscious companions, and then, 
 with frenzied haste, continued their work 
 on the half-completed stopping. 
 
 It was known that in some parts of the 
 mine men were still at work who were 
 unconscious of the fire, and it was neces- 
 
FIRE 79 
 
 sary to warn them, that they might make 
 their escape. Besides these there was an- 
 other band of a half-dozen men who had 
 endeavored to reach the fire from the other 
 side, and who, ignorant of the sudden 
 danger, must also be warned. With three 
 men, Charley Swenson determined to visit 
 the working parts of the mine which lay 
 to the left of the burning entry and ex- 
 tended far behind it. Here there were men 
 working. Within half an hour the alarm 
 had been given and the warning party 
 started back. Half a mile from the mine- 
 bottom, the party stopped for an instant 
 as the sound of an explosion reached their 
 ears, and they realized that the gas gen- 
 erated by the burning coal was beginning 
 to explode somewhere in the mine. To 
 them it was no longer a question of sav- 
 ing the mine, but of preserving [their own 
 lives. 
 
80 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 Beside the track stood one of the elec- 
 tric locomotives. Swenson noticed it and 
 stopped behind his companions, thinking 
 that by using the locomotive they could get 
 more quickly to bottom. He jumped into 
 the low driver's seat before he noticed that 
 the trolley-pole was turned the wrong 
 way. Stumbling out again, he pulled the 
 pole from the wire and turned it and then 
 crawled back into the driver's seat. As 
 his hand reached for the grip of the con- 
 troller, a sudden dizziness seized him and 
 he fell forward unconscious on the frame 
 of the machine. The white-damp was pene- 
 trating all parts of the mine. A minute 
 later like a hurried funeral procession 
 > another group of men came stumbling 
 down the entry, dragging two of their 
 comrades who had been overcome by the 
 gas; and to them Swenson owed his 
 life. 
 
FIRE 81 
 
 The mine-bottom was now filled with 
 smoke, and the deadly gas in diluted 
 quantities hung invisible in the air. At- 
 tempts to stem the course of the fire were 
 realized to be useless, and the business 
 now became that of getting the men from 
 the mine and sealing the shafts at the top. 
 Like the officers of a sinking ship, the 
 mine-manager and the pit-boss held their 
 ground at the foot of the man-hoist; and 
 after the last hoist had carried up the re- 
 mainder of the men who were at bottom, 
 they still waited, blinded in the smoke, 
 for a party of three men who had gone an 
 hour before into some of the more distant 
 workings to carry the warning, and who 
 had not yet appeared. As the smoke grew 
 thicker, they realized how slender was the 
 chance that these men would ever return, 
 but, notwithstanding, they made one at- 
 tempt to follow them and succeeded in 
 
82 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 groping their way into C entry. The fire 
 was already in the entry mouth, and 
 through the smoke they saw the yellow 
 flames creeping over the "overcast" of 
 the air-course. As they turned back to 
 the hoist, far-off voices came through the 
 smoke, and two of the missing men, drag- 
 ging the third, came pitching down the 
 entry. A minute later the little party was 
 on the hoist, and the signal from bottom 
 to " hoist away " was given. The last men 
 were leaving the mine. 
 
 The brilliancy of the clear autumn night 
 was dimming in the first faint light of the 
 dawn when the work of sealing the shafts 
 began. Up into the cloudless sky, through 
 the tangled steel- work of the tipple, a tall 
 tower of black smoke three hundred feet 
 high poured up into the still air and faded 
 into the dawn. In two hours the black pits 
 were covered, first, with a layer of rails, 
 
FIRE 83 
 
 and then on this was laid a solid bed of 
 concrete; and two hours later, only a few 
 thin wisps of smoke that poured up through 
 cracks along the edges of the great seal, 
 like steam beneath the lid of a tea-kettle, 
 told of the inferno that was seething in the 
 mine, four hundred feet below. 
 
 With the air cut off and the shaft sealed, 
 the fire could live only so long as sufficient 
 oxygen remained to feed the flames, and a 
 consultation of blackened men with drawn, 
 tired faces who gathered in the warehouse 
 office determined that the bottom of the 
 mine had been saved, and that the advance 
 of the flames was already checked and had 
 reached its farthest limit by the cutting 
 off of the supply of air. However, the 
 possibilities were so numerous that all 
 seemed but conjecture. It was impossible 
 to tell how long the fire could live on the 
 air which filled the eighty-six miles of 
 
84 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 tunnels; and so hurried had been the final 
 exit from the workings, on account of the 
 men who had been overcome, that the ex- 
 act limits of the fire were unknown. 
 
VII 
 
 THE DEADLY GASES 
 
 AFTEE the labor and excitement of 
 the long night, the sudden stopping 
 of activity came like the breaking of a 
 tightly stretched wire. There was nothing 
 to do but wait. 
 
 The day after the shafts were sealed, as 
 the realization came that it would be days, 
 weeks, or possibly months before opera- 
 tions were resumed, men began leaving 
 the town. Not the old miners fortunately 
 or those who knew the company best, 
 but the shifting population that always 
 takes up the excuse of inactivity to move 
 on to some new field. The men with fam- 
 ilies, the head men, and those of the bet- 
 ter sort remained, and at some time each 
 
86 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 day every one in the half-deserted town 
 walked down to examine the seals on the 
 shafts and to ask questions of the super- 
 intendent and his assistants, who made 
 hourly tests with thermometers as to the 
 heat of the shafts. From these readings 
 it soon became apparent that the sealing 
 of the shafts had abruptly stopped the ad- 
 vance of the fire, and it was evident from 
 the coolness at the shaft-bottoms for the 
 thermometers were lowered through small 
 openings in the seals down to the bottom 
 that there was no fire anywhere around 
 bottom. 
 
 Meanwhile the chief engineer located 
 a spot directly over Third West South, 
 where the fire had been hottest. From the 
 charts showing the curves of the floor of 
 the mine it was discovered that there was 
 a natural declivity starting at the foot of 
 the shaft and descending to the point 
 
THE DEADLY GASES 87 
 
 where the fire had started, and from there 
 the ground rose again to the level of the 
 mine-bottom at the far end of Third West 
 South entry, about three quarters of a 
 mile from the shaft. The total drop at the 
 air-split, where the fire had started, was 
 only about fifteen feet, but as the height 
 of the entry was ten feet, it was evident 
 that if this basin could be filled with water, 
 any fire that existed in that entry could be 
 effectively extinguished without flooding 
 the rest of the mine; a feat that would be 
 impossible on account of the vast area of 
 the workings. Meanwhile, the pipes for 
 compressed air which threaded every tun- 
 nel throughout the mine had been filled 
 with water, and as these pipes would nat- 
 urally be red-hot wherever fire existed, 
 they would burst and discharge the water 
 where it was most needed. 
 
 At the spot located by the head engin- 
 
88 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 eer, a drill-hole was sunk and at four 
 hundred and twelve feet the drill went 
 through, proving that the surveyors' cal- 
 culations had been correct. The pipe-line 
 was immediately connected, and for two 
 weeks a steady stream of water poured 
 into the burned section of the mine. In 
 the meantime, almost hourly observations 
 were taken with the thermometers at the 
 shafts, and record was made of the baro- 
 metric conditions within the mine. A mine 
 that is sealed breathes at regular intervals, 
 like a human being, through the natural 
 crevices in the rock; and even through 
 the seals at the shaft-mouth the vacuum 
 created by the burning out of the oxygen 
 in the mine would draw in the air, and for 
 several hours a handkerchief laid over one 
 of the small openings in the seal would 
 show a steady suction. Then, following, 
 an expansion would be noticeable, and for 
 
THE DEADLY GASES 89 
 
 an equal period the strong, heavy smells 
 of " black-damp " and smoke would exhale 
 from the mine. 
 
 So great was the interest taken by the 
 men in this work of examination that there 
 was little complaining. One morning, how- 
 ever, as I walked back from the power- 
 house to the town, I met Luke Davis, an 
 old miner of about sixty, who came limp- 
 ing down the street toward the mine, and 
 from him I heard the first complaint of 
 the kind (and many like it followed) that 
 I had yet encountered. 
 
 " The air on top ain't fit to live in," he 
 said. "One day it's cold; next day it's 
 hot. I 've had rheumatism ever since the 
 mine shut down. The only place a man 
 keeps his health is underground." And 
 there were many others who shared his 
 views. 
 
 Four weeks after the shafts were sealed, 
 
90 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 it was determined that some sort of per- 
 sonal investigation should be made of the 
 conditions in the mine. The thermometers 
 showed that the atmosphere at bottom was 
 reasonably cool, and the amount of water 
 that had been pumped into Third West 
 South was calculated to have filled that 
 entry completely. In addition to this, the 
 steam generated by this water must have 
 reached out and extinguished any fire that 
 might have existed beyond the reach of 
 the water itself. The temperature read- 
 ings taken at the bottom of the man-hoist 
 were a few degrees higher than those at 
 the bottom of the air-shaft, and as the di- 
 rection of the fire followed the course of 
 the air, which led to the foot of the man- 
 hoist, it was believed that the safest en- 
 trance into the mine could be made by 
 means of the air-shaft, which was located 
 on the main or B entry, about three hun- 
 
THE DEADLY GASES 91 
 
 dred feet from the man-hoist and coal- 
 hoisting shaft. 
 
 The second reason for the choice lay in 
 the fact that in opening this shaft for the 
 descent it would not be necessary to allow 
 any air to enter the mine, as the top of the 
 shaft was completely inclosed by a part of 
 the fan-house a massive dome of brick 
 and concrete. If the main hoisting-shaft 
 were opened, it would be necessary to 
 construct some sort of an air-lock above 
 it, and this would be rendered still more 
 difficult from the fact that this shaft com- 
 prised not only the man-hoist, but two 
 hoisting-shafts, and was, accordingly, three 
 times larger than the air-shaft. The prin- 
 cipal objection to the plan lay in the fact 
 that the facilities for reaching bottom by 
 means of the air-shaft were very inade- 
 quate, whereas, by the other entrance, use 
 could be made of the hoisting-cage. 
 
92 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 One thing was apparent; and that was, 
 that under no consideration should any air 
 be allowed to enter the mine, as the en- 
 trance of air would not only fan up any 
 latent fire which might exist, but the mix- 
 ture of air with the almost pure gas, or 
 " after- damp," which existed throughout 
 the entire workings, would cause a most 
 violent explosion, and the death of any 
 who were within its reach. Tests of the 
 mine-atmosphere which had been made by 
 chemists showed less than one per cent of 
 oxygen and the presence of enormous 
 quantities of the various gases generated 
 by the burning coal. So poisonous was the 
 atmosphere for under no consideration 
 could it be called " air" which filled the 
 shafts and every foot of the tunneling 
 below the seals, that life would be extin- 
 guished in approximately ninety seconds, 
 should any man be compelled to breathe it. 
 
THE DEADLY GASES 93 
 
 The gases which filled the mine con- 
 sisted principally of carbon monoxide, or 
 white-damp, and carbon dioxide, or black- 
 damp, with a small additional percentage 
 of other gases. White-damp is the gas 
 most feared by the miners, for its proper- 
 ties render it difficult to detect, inasmuch 
 as it is tasteless, odorless, and colorless, 
 and when mixed in the proportion of about 
 one part gas to nine parts air is called " fire- 
 damp," and becomes explosive to a degree 
 hard to realize unless one has seen its ef- 
 fects. Black-damp, unlike white-damp, is 
 heavier than air: a non-explosive gas 
 which may be detected by its peculiar 
 odor. Again, unlike the other, its effect 
 is to suffocate and extinguish fire. This 
 gas is so heavy and moves with such a 
 sluggish flow that, occasionally, when 
 miners have been trapped in a mine fol- 
 lowing an explosion and have detected 
 
94 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 the black-damp creeping in upon them by 
 its smell, they have been able to stop its 
 advance by erecting dams or barricades 
 along the floor, building them higher as 
 the volume of gas increased, and keeping 
 the air within their little inclosure com- 
 paratively clear by rude, improvised fans. 
 Following an explosion, these two gases 
 become mingled and form a mixed gas 
 possessing all the dreaded qualities of 
 each, which is known as "after-damp," 
 and it is this mixture of gases which de- 
 stroys any life that may remain following 
 a mine disaster. 
 
 To contend with these almost impossible 
 conditions, it was determined to make the 
 descent equipped with air-tight helmets, 
 somewhat resembling in appearance those 
 used by deep-sea divers. This ingenious 
 device, which enables a man to exist under 
 such conditions and to conduct investiga- 
 
THE DEADLY GASES 95 
 
 tions for a period of two hours, consists of 
 a steel headpiece completely covering the 
 fore part of the head and leaving the ears 
 exposed, made air-tight by means of a 
 pneumatic washer which passes in a circle 
 around the top of the head and down each 
 side of the face in front of the ears, con- 
 necting under the chin. This washer is in- 
 flated as soon as the helmet is adjusted, and 
 pressing out closely against the steel shell 
 of the helmet on one side, conforms closely 
 to the contours of the head on the other, 
 leaving the ears exposed. In the front of 
 each helmet is a round bull's-eye of heavy 
 mica, protected by steel rods; and below 
 the bull's-eye, an inch below the mouth, 
 is the main valve which is closed immedi- 
 ately before the man enters the poisoned 
 atmosphere. 
 
 From the helmet, in front, hangs a pair 
 of false lungs, or large rubber sacks, pro- 
 
96 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 tected by a leather apron ; and on the back, 
 held by straps over the shoulders and sup- 
 ported by plates fitting closely to the small 
 of the back, hangs a heavy knapsack 
 weighing about forty pounds. This knap- 
 sack consists of two steel cylinders, each 
 one containing pure oxygen compressed 
 to one hundred and thirty atmospheres, 
 sufficient to support life for one hour, 
 the two together being sufficient for two 
 hours. Above the oxygen-cylinders are 
 two cartridges, or cans, containing loose 
 crystals of hydrate of potassium sufficient 
 to absorb two hours' exhalation of carbonic 
 acid gas. With the helmet these cartridges 
 and the oxygen-cylinders are connected hi 
 a continuous circuit, and as soon as the 
 oxygen is turned on there is a flow up from 
 the oxygen-cylinders by a tube under the 
 right arm to the helmet, and down under 
 the left arm to the cartridges, and through 
 
THE DEADLY GASES 97 
 
 them again to the tube at the oxygen 
 valve. 
 
 Upon adjusting the helmet, the wearer 
 takes several large breaths of pure air, 
 which he exhales into the false lungs on 
 his chest, and immediately shuts the mouth- 
 valve. At the same instant, with his right 
 hand behind his back, he turns on the ox- 
 ygen, and this, regulated by valves to an 
 even feed to last for exactly two hours, 
 forces itself up the tube into the helmet, 
 and by its pressure and reverse suction, 
 draws down through the other tube and 
 through the cans of potassium hydrate the 
 exhaled breath. Air being a mixture of 
 pure nitrogen and pure oxygen, the oxy- 
 gen cylinders furnish one necessary ele- 
 ment. The second the nitrogen al- 
 ready exists in the several breaths that 
 the man has taken into the false lungs, for 
 the nitrogen atoms are indestructible and, 
 
98 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 mixed with oxygen, can be used indefi- 
 nitely. Passing through the potassium- 
 hydrate cylinders, the carbonic acid gas is 
 entirely absorbed, leaving the free nitro- 
 gen atoms to unite with the oxygen below; 
 and so for two hours, a steady stream of 
 air passes up through the right-hand tube, 
 and for two hours the cans of potassium 
 hydrate absorb the impurities exhaled, and 
 pass on the nitrogen atoms to unite with 
 the fresh oxygen ever flowing up from 
 the cylinders. 
 
 In order that the helmet-men might 
 keep exact account of the amount of oxy- 
 gen used, there was a clock fastened to the 
 knapsack. When the helmet was adjusted 
 and the oxygen turned on, the hand of the 
 clock pointed to two hours, and as the 
 pressure in the cylinders was reduced, the 
 hand slid back to one hour, thirty minutes, 
 fifteen, and finally zero, when it would be 
 
THE DEADLY GASES 99 
 
 necessary to open the valves and breathe 
 the outer air or suffocate. "We could not 
 see the clocks on our own knapsacks, as 
 they were behind our backs, and so every 
 fifteen minutes or so we would gather in 
 the gas-filled tunnels, and with our electric 
 torches read the minutes remaining on 
 each other's clocks. Thirty minutes left 
 meant a start for top, even if we were near 
 the hoist. We could take no chances. Un- 
 conscious men are hard to move, espe- 
 cially when one's own air has almost gone. 
 It will be clearly seen that it would have 
 been impossible to lower a man into the 
 mine, connected with the surface by an 
 air-hose, as in submarine diving, for the 
 extent of his investigations would be lim- 
 ited to an area extending not more than a 
 few yards from the mouth of the shaft; 
 and the weight of four hundred feet of 
 such an air-line would be liable to tear the 
 
100 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 hose, in which case death would be instan- 
 taneous. Compressed air also was imprac- 
 ticable, for a sufficient supply of com- 
 pressed air to enable a man to be lowered 
 to bottom and conduct his investigations 
 and return would, at its highest compres- 
 sion, necessitate a cylinder of a size and 
 weight that would make free movement 
 impossible. 
 
VIII 
 
 FIGHTING FOE THE MINE 
 
 IT was a cold, gray morning when a 
 dozen of the men chosen to effect the 
 first descent into the mine gathered inside 
 the small stockade about the air-shaft. 
 Outside the fence, unmindful of the rain 
 and cold, a hundred silent, unexpressive 
 faces pressed close against the palings and 
 watched for what might come. Everything 
 was in readiness for the descent. Inside 
 the dome above the air-shaft the seal had 
 been removed; and the double doors, form- 
 ing a sort of vestibule, which connected 
 this room with the outer world, made an 
 effective air-lock through which the men 
 might enter. A large, square box, which 
 in the time of operation had been used to 
 
102 A YtiAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 lower heavy supplies, and occasionally 
 mules, into the mine, hung suspended by 
 a steel cable in the air-shaft, and was low- 
 ered or raised by means of an engine in 
 the fan-house, the cable running over a 
 sheave-wheel in the crown of the dome. 
 
 The air-shaft consisted of two compart- 
 ments : the main shaft, which was fourteen 
 by twelve feet a smooth, board-lined 
 shaft, four hundred feet in depth; and an 
 escapement or stairway-shaft beside it, 
 built, in compliance with the law regulat- 
 ing coal-mines, for use in case of accident 
 to the hoisting apparatus. The stairway- 
 shaft was separated from the air-shaft 
 proper by a partition of matched boards, 
 and connected with it at the mine-bottom 
 by a small door. From the bottom of the 
 air-shaft two ventilating tunnels extended, 
 one east, one west; the east air-course on 
 a level with the mine-bottom; the west, by 
 
FIGHTING FOR THE MINE 103 
 
 means of an "overcast" or bridge across 
 the main entry, a passage at a level of 
 about ten feet from the bottom of the air- 
 shaft. Thus to a man standing at the foot 
 of the air-shaft facing the north, the east 
 air-course, on his right, was on the same 
 level as the floor of the air-shaft, the west 
 air-course, on his left, was a square open- 
 ing ten feet above the ground. From these 
 conditions it would be necessary, in order 
 to reach B entry, which ran under the 
 west air-course, to pass from the bottom 
 of the air-shaft through the door at the 
 foot of the escapement-shaft, and thence 
 by another small door into B entry. 
 
 No one knew what conditions would be 
 met with at bottom, but it was determined 
 to make a trial trip, lowering three men in 
 helmets to the bottom of the air-shaft, and 
 hoisting them again without allowing them 
 to leave the box; and, if their trip were sue- 
 
104 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 cessful, to send a second crew of three 
 helmeted men, who would pass through 
 the doors into the main entry and, return- 
 ing, report what conditions they had found 
 there. Preparatory to the descent, the box 
 was lowered until the white mark on the 
 cable-drum in the engine-house showed 
 that it had reached bottom, when it was 
 hoisted again. This showed that there was 
 no wreckage of any sort in the shaft, which 
 might have been the case had the fire 
 burned loose the shaft-lining. 
 
 At half -past nine, the first crew was 
 ready : volunteers, selected for their ability 
 to cope with emergencies, who received 
 large pay on account of the dangerous 
 nature of their work; and with their hel- 
 mets in place and the oxygen turned on, 
 the outer door of the fan-house was closed 
 behind them, and the rest of us sat down 
 to wait. It was fully five minutes before 
 
FIGHTING FOR THE MINE 105 
 
 the squeaking of the big drum in the fan- 
 house told us that they had started. Inside, 
 lying on the floor at the edge of the shaft, 
 lay a man in a helmet to receive the sig- 
 nals which might be sent upward by the 
 men in the box. The round blade of a cir- 
 cular saw had been hung by a wire from 
 the bale of the box (the iron beam from 
 which it was suspended like a basket), 
 and signals were given by striking this 
 with a hammer. Upon hearing a signal, 
 the man at the edge of the shaft-mouth 
 would immediately transmit it by puffing 
 a bell-rope which rang a bell in the engine- 
 room. One stroke meant "stop." Two 
 strokes, " haul up." Three, " lower away." 
 Four, " safe arrival." Five strokes on the 
 saw-blade which rang like a great bell 
 meant "haul out at top speed; danger 
 has been encountered." 
 
 Three minutes after the box had started 
 
106 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 its descent came a sudden violent ring on 
 the bell-rope, and the intense agony of 
 uncertainty became almost unbearable. 
 Then came three bells, and we knew that 
 the journey had been resumed. Five min- 
 utes for the box had been lowered very 
 slowly and then came the four strokes 
 denoting their arrival; and a minute later, 
 the two bells to hoist. Four minutes later 
 there was a noise inside the house and, 
 with a puff of smoke, the door burst open 
 and the four helmeted men, the three who 
 had made the trip and the signalman, 
 stumbled out into the light. The doors 
 were instantly closed, the helmets removed, 
 and the first story of the descent into the 
 mine was told. 
 
 So dense was the dead smoke in the 
 shaft, and so feeble the light of the electric 
 torches which they carried, that they had 
 seen nothing. Their descent had been un- 
 
FIGHTING FOR THE MINE 107 
 
 eventful except once, when the box, swing- 
 ing silently in the shaft, had for a second 
 struck on one of the cross-ribs, and hence 
 their signal to stop. At bottom they had 
 noticed no excessive heat, although the 
 sweat which poured from their bodies 
 showed that the temperature was far from 
 normal. But they had seen no fire that 
 was the main point. 
 
 An hour later the second shift was 
 ready, of which I was a member, my com- 
 panions being Delmer, the mine-engineer, 
 and Knox, one of the pit-bosses. Before 
 starting, all our plans were carefully ar- 
 ranged : Delmer was to carry the hammer, 
 with which he would signal on the saw- 
 blade; I was to carry his electric torch 
 and my own; and Knox was to pay espe- 
 cial heed to the swinging of the box to 
 prevent it from catching on the side of 
 the shaft. Upon reaching bottom, we were 
 
108 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 to leave the box and pass through the 
 door into the bottom of the escapement, 
 and thence out through the second door 
 into B entry. There we were to take the 
 temperature with a self-recording ther- 
 mometer, and observe whatever we could 
 without going more than a few yards from 
 the door. This over, we were to return. 
 
 "With a last look at the cold, gray sky, 
 we adjusted our helmets. The clamps 
 were tightened, the washers inflated, and 
 we drew in long breaths of the damp air. 
 Then the mouth-valves were snapped in 
 place, and the hissing in the valves and a 
 sweetish taste in my mouth told me that 
 the oxygen had been turned on. Like 
 children in a darkened room, we followed 
 Delmer through the first door and turned 
 to see it close behind us. There was a sud- 
 den blackness, and silence save for the 
 steady hissing of the compressed oxygen 
 
FIGHTING FOR THE MINE 109 
 
 and the even click of the regulating valves. 
 The second door was opened, and without 
 seeing it we passed through and stood, as 
 we knew, on the brink of the open shaft. 
 Here three electric lights gleamed dim 
 and far away through the thick smoke 
 that completely filled the dome above the 
 shaft-mouth. 
 
 I had known darkness before the 
 darkness of the mine, darkness that meant 
 a complete absence of light; but here was 
 an opaque darkness, a darkness that the 
 presence of light failed to affect. At my 
 feet a board stretched out into the smoke 
 and disappeared. Stooping clumsily to my 
 knees under the weight of the helmet, and 
 peering forward through the bull's eye in 
 the dim rays of the electric lights, I saw 
 that the board passed over three feet of 
 blackness into the box which hung in the 
 middle of the shaft. One side of the box, 
 
110 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 fastened by heavy hinges, had been low- 
 ered down like a drawbridge, and from 
 this open side to my feet extended the 
 frail gang-plank that we must pass over. 
 Out before me, in the smoke and black- 
 ness, the box swung dimly, its nearest 
 angle half -lost, like the bow of a ship in a 
 dense fog. 
 
 One by one, we crawled on our hands 
 and knees over the swaying board and 
 reached the box; but so dense was the 
 smoke and blackness that, holding my 
 electric torch at arm's length, try as I 
 might, I could distinguish nothing but a 
 faint yellow smudge of light at a distance 
 that I knew to be but the length of my 
 arm. The last man having crossed, the 
 watcher in his helmet on the brink pulled 
 back the board; and groping clumsily, and 
 hampered in the darkness, we pulled up 
 the swinging side of the box and lashed 
 
FIGHTING FOR THE MINE 111 
 
 it into place. Then, clear and vibrant, 
 came the three strokes from Delmer's 
 hammer on the saw-blade. Far away we 
 heard the bell transmitting our signal hi 
 the engine-house ; and then, imperceptibly, 
 without jolt or sound, the faint smudge of 
 tawny yellow of the three electric lights 
 on the edge of the shaft seemed to rise 
 above us, and standing silent in the 
 box we sank into blackness unutterable. 
 Instantly, sense of direction was gone. 
 "We could see nothing. We could not 
 even see through the bull's eyes of our 
 helmets the walls of the shaft almost 
 within arm's reach. Once, I held my light 
 pointed close against the bull's-eye of my 
 helmet, and found a sudden relief in its 
 yellow glare. 
 
 For a time that was eternity we seemed 
 to swing in the blackness of space, but we 
 knew that we were steadily descending. 
 
112 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 I was gripping the side of the box, which 
 came about to my waist-line, with one 
 hand, and trying with my torch hi the 
 other to peer through the smoke at the 
 side of the shaft, when there was a sud- 
 den jolt and an abrupt stop. The box, 
 swinging in its descent, had caught by 
 one corner on a cross-rib of the shaft. 
 The sudden stroke from Delmer's ham- 
 mer on the gong vibrated in my ears, and 
 I felt the floor of the box tipping under 
 me like the deck of a sinking ship. With 
 one arm hooked over the side, and the 
 other clutching at the bale, I clung fran- 
 tically, I could not even see to what, in 
 the darkness. Far above us, the signal had 
 been heard and transmitted, and with the 
 box at an angle of almost forty-five de- 
 grees, it stopped in its descent. There 
 was a moment of waiting and then a lurch 
 as KJIOX pushed us free from the side of 
 
FIGHTING FOR THE MINE 113 
 
 the shaft, and at the same instant a sud- 
 den slap as the heavy box fell and brought 
 up on about three feet of slack steel cable. 
 We learned afterward that we were at a 
 level of about two hundred feet. Then 
 three strokes, and we knew that we were 
 again descending; but now, with hands 
 outstretched, we pushed ourselves away 
 from the walls as we swung from side to 
 side in our descent. Two minutes more 
 and our heavy car landed lightly as a 
 thistle at the bottom of the air-shaft. 
 
 We had expected that we should feel 
 the slight shock as we hit bottom, not- 
 withstanding the fact that the engineer 
 on top would calculate our position exactly 
 and would bring us slowly to a rest; but 
 our arrival was puzzling, for there was 
 no jar and, in addition, the box landed on 
 an angle, when it should have rested 
 squarely on the floor of the air-shaft. For 
 
114 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 a few seconds we remained in our places, 
 silent and wondering; then, one by one, 
 we climbed over the side. As I stepped 
 over the edge of the box, taking care that 
 the tubes of my apparatus did not catch 
 on any projections, my feet almost slipped 
 from under me, for it seemed as though 
 I had placed them on a slippery mattress. 
 
 One by one we crawled out and over 
 the strange, soft object that lay under the 
 box; and then, peering closely in the faint 
 light of our torches, we saw that we had 
 landed on the bloated bodies of two mules 
 which had evidently fled before the smoke 
 and fire when the mine was abandoned 
 and had died seeking the last breath of 
 air at the foot of the air-shaft. 
 
 There was about a foot of water at the 
 bottom of the shaft, for we had pumped 
 water down the sides to prevent the heat 
 from igniting the thin board lining; and 
 
FIGHTING FOR THE MINE 115 
 
 through the water, and over the bodies of 
 the mules, we groped our way to the small 
 door a yard away that led in to the foot 
 of the escapement. One by one we crawled 
 through the door, wriggling to get our 
 shoulders and our knapsacks through its 
 small confines, and yet with constant care 
 that the tubes of the apparatus and the 
 knapsack and helmet did not touch any- 
 thing; for the words of the chemist, that 
 ninety seconds of the gas would kill, were 
 never for an instant forgotten. The foot 
 of the escapement was a little lower than 
 the bottom of the air-shaft and the water 
 correspondingly deeper. With the clear 
 splashing in contrast to the dullness of 
 the darkness, we groped for the second 
 door and passed through it into B entry. 
 As I lifted up my shoulders on the other 
 side of the doorway, a sudden heat struck 
 me, and I realized that the fire had been 
 
116 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 nearer the mine-bottom than we had sup- 
 posed. 
 
 Uncertain as to the perfect efficiency 
 of our apparatus for we were all new 
 to it we refrained from venturing far 
 from the little doorway through which 
 we had just passed. "With our hands we 
 examined the props on either side of the 
 entry, and from their feeling knew that 
 the fire had not reached them, and that 
 the mine-bottom was unharmed; but the 
 intense heat which brought the sweat sud- 
 denly out upon us raised the fear that 
 somewhere, perhaps only a few yards 
 away, hidden in the smoke and darkness, 
 lay a dormant fire which the presence of 
 air would fan into active flames. Slowly 
 we withdrew through the doorway, and 
 once more climbed over the mules into 
 the box. The sudden transition from the 
 heat of B entry to the cooler atmosphere 
 
FIGHTING FOR THE MINE 117 
 
 of the air-shaft condensed the sweat inside 
 our helmets and smeared the inside of our 
 bull's-eyes with a thick white mist that 
 cut off even the little that we had previ- 
 ously been able to see. 
 
 I have not mentioned the conversation 
 or words that passed between us, but I 
 do not remember that we said much be- 
 yond the few words that were necessary. 
 The scant sounds that echoed through 
 the isinglass of the helmets seemed more 
 like the far-off bellow of some animal than 
 the voice of a man. 
 
 Once again in the car, we gave our sig- 
 nal, and far off four hundred feet above 
 us the expectant ears of the watcher 
 caught the note of our two bells like dis- 
 tant church chimes; softly we felt our- 
 selves lifted, and the ascent was begun. 
 Four minutes later the three electric lights 
 at the shaft-brink glowed now almost 
 
118 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 defiantly through the smoke, and we 
 lowered the side of our ship and dragged 
 in our gang-plank. Then, one by one, we 
 groped through the first door all of us 
 and then through the second. My hel- 
 met had leaked and my head reeled in a 
 misty sort of way from the time I left 
 bottom; and as the bright, gray world 
 outside streamed in through the sweat- 
 streaked bull's-eye, it seemed more like a 
 pleasantly swaying picture than a reality. 
 Some one pulled open my air-valve, and 
 in a second my helmet was off and I drew 
 into my lungs air that had seemed never 
 so sweet or fresh. 
 
 Already another crew was preparing 
 for a third descent, to carry our investi- 
 gations still further. 
 
 For one long week we continued our 
 work at the air-shaft, and almost every 
 hour a crew of helmeted men was lowered 
 
FIGHTING FOR THE MINE 119 
 
 down in the swinging box to the bottom. 
 Working in the darkness by the feeble 
 light of their torches, knee-deep in water 
 and climbing over the rotting bodies of 
 the mules, they erected stoppings across 
 the openings of the two air-courses which 
 led from the bottom of the air-shaft. The 
 small door connecting the air-shaft with 
 the escapement or stairway was then 
 opened, and a few hours later the big fan 
 at the fan-house began slowly to turn over 
 and force pure air down the air-shaft, 
 which as our stoppings proved to be 
 tight found no escape into the mine 
 and returned up the stairway, making a 
 single loop at the bottom. In half an hour 
 both compartments of the shaft were clear, 
 and men, with safety-lamps and helmets 
 ready in case of danger, descended and 
 found the smoke gone and the air clean 
 on the bottom. That night the bodies of 
 
120 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 the nearest mules were hoisted out and 
 everything was put in readiness for a trip 
 on the following morning into the tunnels 
 of the mine nearest the air-shaft. With 
 clean air at bottom, it was now possible 
 to put on our helmets there and go directly 
 into the mine, avoiding the danger and 
 discomfort of the long helmeted trip down 
 the smoke-filled shaft. 
 
 It was about nine o'clock in the morn- 
 ing when four of us prepared for this first 
 investigation of conditions existing in the 
 mine surrounding the air-shaft. Our hel- 
 mets were adjusted on top, leaving the 
 air-valve open, to be closed when we 
 passed through the small door at the foot 
 of the stairway into the mine. Delmer 
 stayed in the box, and the three of us left 
 him and, splashing noisily in the water, 
 crawled through the small door into the 
 door of the escapement, and then suddenly 
 
FIGHTING FOR THE MINE 121 
 
 opening the door into the mine, passed 
 through it as quickly as we were able. 
 We realized that fire might exist beyond, 
 a possibility which made it necessary for 
 us to crawl through as quickly as possible 
 in order that the puff of air which would 
 accompany us might not be of sufficient 
 volume to mix with gas and form an ex- 
 plosive mixture which the fire would ig- 
 nite. I was the last to go through the door, 
 turning my shoulders sideways in order 
 to pass my knapsack through the narrow 
 aperture. 
 
 From the comparative coolness of the 
 shaft we stepped out into B entry, and our 
 first impression was one of heat, for the 
 air was hot beyond our expectation. We 
 had supposed from the volume of smoke 
 that had been in the air-shaft before it was 
 blown out that B entry, and probably 
 most of the rest of the mine, would be in 
 
A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 a like condition, but the conditions were 
 almost worse than they had been in the 
 air-shaft. The smoke was thick as a fog- 
 bank. Groping blindly through the black- 
 ness upon which our lights seemed scarcely 
 to make an impression, we reached the 
 other side of the entry, a distance of about 
 twenty feet. Then, through the sweat- 
 streaked glass in my helmet, I saw a dull 
 red glow, first almost imperceptible, and 
 then brighter as we advanced : a tinge of 
 tawny color smeared into the thick black 
 smoke. The entry was still on fire, and a 
 few steps more brought us so close to the 
 flames that the heat on our unprotected 
 hands and necks became almost unbeara- 
 ble. There was nothing now that could 
 be accomplished, and after a few brief 
 words from MacPherson, bellowed through 
 his helmet, we turned and felt our way 
 back to the small doorway. 
 
FIGHTING FOR THE MINE 123 
 
 It was now doubly necessary that our 
 exit should be made as quickly as possi- 
 ble, for we were standing in a gas-filled 
 entry; an open fire, denoting the presence 
 of oxygen, was burning actively behind 
 us, and every second that the door re- 
 mained open as we passed out would al- 
 low the clean air from the air-shaft, carry- 
 ing more oxygen, to pass into the entry. 
 
 Without a word, stumbling awkwardly 
 in our haste, we climbed through the door 
 and fastened it behind us. " The entry is 
 on fire," we shouted to Delmer as we 
 climbed over the edge of the box; and 
 then for three or four long minutes we 
 stood, voiceless, as the box swung up- 
 ward, each man with the fear in his heart 
 that a sudden explosive blast from the 
 mine below would hurl us to an instant 
 destruction. 
 
IX 
 
 EXPLOSIONS 
 
 OUE exit was safely accomplished, 
 and after a conference at the fan- 
 house it was realized that through some 
 crevice or opening from the air-shaft to 
 the mine, which had escaped our notice, air 
 had passed into the workings; and while 
 we had labored taking out the bodies of 
 the mules, the latent fire, revived by this 
 new supply of oxygen, had been fanned 
 into active flame and had crawled down 
 the entry to the very bottom of the shaft. 
 Under these conditions all our work had 
 to be abandoned, and reluctantly we re- 
 placed the seal over the air-shaft. A few 
 hours more would have been all that was 
 
EXPLOSIONS 125 
 
 necessary to bring the fire into the shaft 
 and destroy it. 
 
 Again a number of the men who had 
 until now been active in the work lost 
 heart and left town. December had come, 
 and with it, cold, gray days, with occa- 
 sional flurries of snow, and ice in the early 
 mornings. Disappointed, but not down- 
 hearted, and spurred on by the more than 
 double pay they were receiving for their 
 work, the men who remained began to 
 follow out the instructions of those in 
 charge for conquering this unexpected 
 development. At the mouth of the air- 
 shaft a great furnace was constructed, and 
 for four days and nights the fumes of sul- 
 phur were pumped slowly down the air- 
 shaft: a vapor which sank of its own ac- 
 cord into the mine and, it was believed, 
 would smother out the flames at the foot 
 of the shaft. In addition, the pipes, which 
 
126 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 had been connected with the two drill- 
 holes that we had bored down from the 
 surface into the mine, were connected with 
 the boilers in the power-house, and for a 
 week steam was sent down the pipes to 
 condense in the mine below, and assist the 
 sulphur fumes in extinguishing the fire. 
 
 By the middle of the month, it was de- 
 termined to make another attempt to de- 
 scend into the mine. It was no longer ad- 
 visable to use the air-shaft as an entrance, 
 for our previous experience had told us 
 that the fire, if it still existed, would be 
 at the foot of that shaft; accordingly an 
 air-tight house with double doors and a 
 vestibule was built over the hoisting-shaft, 
 and preparations were made to descend in 
 the regular hoisting-cage. This was much 
 easier, for here there was no danger of 
 mishap, as there had been in the swinging 
 box in the air-shaft. The steel elevator 
 
EXPLOSIONS 127 
 
 would carry us to the bottom in less than 
 a minute, and the regular mine-signals 
 would give us easy communication, when 
 on bottom, with the men above. 
 
 The first trip down proved highly en- 
 couraging. There was no fire or trace of 
 fire anywhere around the foot of the hoist- 
 ing-shaft. The entry was filled with smoke, 
 but it was not as dense as it had been in 
 the other shaft, and with new and more 
 brilliant portable electric lights which we 
 had secured, we were able to work under 
 far more favorable conditions. The first 
 crew that descended went only to the 
 bottom and was immediately hoisted out 
 again; the second crew continued the ex- 
 ploration from the bottom of the shaft; 
 and the third crew, of which I was a mem- 
 ber, explored B entry toward the foot of 
 the air-shaft as far as we were able to 
 penetrate. 
 
128 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 At about two thirds of the distance be- 
 tween the hoisting-shaft and the air-shaft, 
 the steam which had been pumped into the 
 mine had loosened the roof, and a great 
 " fall " of white stone seemed effectively 
 to block the tunnel. On our next trip, 
 however, we discovered that high up on 
 the right side was a small opening through 
 which we could crawl; and, hampered by 
 our helmets, and fearing to press even 
 lightly against the great blocks of stone 
 which arched above us, lest a touch should 
 bring down tons of rock from the loose 
 roof, we crawled over the "fall " and down 
 into the entry on the other side. 
 
 Here the smoke was as thick as it had 
 been when we first penetrated into that 
 portion of the entry from the air-shaft, 
 but the heat was gone, which seemed to 
 indicate that the sulphur and steam had 
 done their work. Tramping through the 
 
EXPLOSIONS 129 
 
 water which flooded the floor of the en- 
 try, and which was now coated, like boiled 
 milk, with a white skin of sulphur, we 
 reached the bottom of the air-shaft. A 
 few feet beyond the small door, the fire 
 which we had seen that other morning 
 had burned through the props and, the 
 support gone, the roof had fallen; to what 
 extent we were unable to determine. The 
 work before us now consisted in shutting 
 off the various entrances into the rest of 
 the mine which led from that part of the 
 entry lying between the two shafts, in 
 order that we might remove the seals from 
 the air-shaft and draw the air slowly down 
 the hoisting-shaft, through B entry and 
 the small door at the bottom of the es- 
 capement in the air-shaft, and up to the 
 top again through the air-shaft; thus cre- 
 ating an actual air-zone in the mine re- 
 claimed from the gas and smoke. 
 
130 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 For ten long days the work continued, 
 so slowly and so laboriously that it was 
 sometimes hard to see the end of our la- 
 bors. Hampered by the weight and bulk 
 of the helmets, and panting when our ex- 
 ertions caused our lungs to demand more 
 air than the regulating valves could sup- 
 ply, we erected six stoppings, of matched 
 boards and canvas, over the mouths of the 
 various tunnels which led off from B entry ; 
 and with our bare hands mixed plaster and 
 smeared the cracks and edges until the 
 stoppings were tight. Then came the last 
 and hardest stopping of all, for one had to 
 be built across the entry just beyond the 
 air-shaft, for which it was necessary to 
 carry all the material lumber, saws, 
 hammers, metal lath, and sacks of plaster 
 up the entry to the fall, and then over 
 the hazardous pass and down into the 
 smoke and water on the other side. 
 
EXPLOSIONS 131 
 
 Day and night the work continued, and 
 after a week of terrible labor the stopping 
 was completed. I remember one of the last 
 trips we made, when nerves and muscles, 
 worn and exhausted, almost refused to con- 
 tinue their work. We had crawled through 
 the pass down into the smoke and water 
 on the other side. The day before, two 
 coils of hose had been dragged over the 
 fall and, with the greatest difficulty, con- 
 nected with the water-main in the air- 
 shaft, and the streams directed against the 
 fall beyond the air-shaft, where fire might 
 still exist beneath the tons of fallen rock. 
 The muffled roar of the water filled the 
 black smoke-packed tunnel with sound, 
 and every few minutes the tall, four-hun- 
 dred-foot column in the pipe would break, 
 and there would be a roar and crash as 
 though the whole roof were giving way 
 above us. 
 
132 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 We had left a little opening in the stop- 
 ping, that we might go through and plas- 
 ter the opposite side, and as I crawled 
 back from doing this work, my helmet 
 struck sharply and twisted sideways on 
 my head for a second, allowing a little gas 
 to leak in between the washers. A minute 
 later, as I rose to my feet, a dizziness 
 seized me, and calling to my two helpers, 
 we started for the hoisting-shaft. We all 
 realized that should a man become uncon- 
 scious through a leak in his hemlet, it 
 would be impossible to get the deadweight 
 of his body up and over the fall. With that 
 one thought in each mind, we slowly 
 crawled up and over the masses of rock, 
 through which many journeys had worn a 
 hazardous path, and down on the other 
 side. And now flashes of light, like elec- 
 tric sparks, seemed to play before my eyes, 
 sliding down across the front of my hel- 
 
EXPLOSIONS 133 
 
 met. My knees began to sway, and it sud- 
 denly occurred to me that they must be 
 bending in both directions as I walked. It 
 was a hard trip to the shaft, and I realized 
 how bright was the cold sunshine on top, 
 and how clean and crisp was the open air, 
 when they helped me off with my helmet. 
 
 On Christmas Eve we lost a man under 
 very similar circumstances. Either by 
 striking his head or in some other way, he 
 had loosened his hemlet and been over- 
 come by the gas which had leaked in. His 
 body lay on the far side of a brattice, and 
 his weight and the helmets which his com- 
 panions wore so hampered them that death 
 came before he was finally brought to the 
 surface. 
 
 With the completion of this last stop- 
 ping, the end of our terrible work seemed 
 near, and it was with the spirit of a holi- 
 day that the men tore off the seal from the 
 
134 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 air-shaft and opened the doors of the 
 house at the top of the man-hoist. Slowly 
 the great fan once more turned, and after 
 two hours, when the safety-lamps no 
 longer detected the presence of gas in the 
 air which came out of the air-shaft, we 
 cautiously descended. "With our helmets 
 laid aside and with the comparatively 
 bright light of our safety-lamps, the mine 
 took on a more familiar and homelike as- 
 pect. In a few hours, no longer hampered 
 by hemlets or conditions of smoke and gas, 
 we tore down a wide passage through the 
 fall, an operation that would have taken 
 days to accomplish under the former con- 
 ditions, with the helmets. That evening hi 
 the Superintendent's room in the office- 
 building, those who were in charge, with 
 the maps of the mine spread before them, 
 planned the next move in the fight and 
 determined which entries should next be 
 
EXPLOSIONS 135 
 
 opened and how the air-currents should 
 be led into them in order that the mine, 
 tunnel by tunnel and section by section, 
 might be cleared of the smoke and gas. 
 
 Meanwhile, a dozen men, under the 
 leadership of Boar, had remained in the 
 mine and were tightening the stoppings 
 and preparing for the work of the coming 
 day. It was about eleven o'clock that night 
 when Boar heard a slight explosion beyond 
 the stopping by the air-shaft. "Without 
 alarming his men, he began an investiga- 
 tion, when two more violent explosions 
 threatened to blow down the stopping. 
 The unexpected had again happened. 
 Stoppings once more had leaked, air had 
 passed into the gas-filled tunnels, and fire 
 still existed. 
 
 "Without a second's delay the men were 
 hoisted from the mine, and fifteen minutes 
 after the last man stepped from the cage 
 
136 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 there came a sudden explosion in the mine. 
 From the hoisting-shafts a huge white 
 cloud of vapor shot up into the night; but 
 at the air-shaft the force of the explosion 
 was more violent, and the great dome of 
 reinforced concrete above it fell in a mass 
 of crumbled wreckage, swept back clean 
 from the edge of the shaft. 
 
 It was one o'clock when I reached the 
 fan-house, and a great full moon was 
 standing high in the cold winter sky. Up 
 from the square, black mouth of the air- 
 shaft, a tall white column of vapor rose 
 into the night, and then, when the mine 
 began to breathe, disappeared; and with 
 our hands held above the black hole, we 
 could feel the rush of air sucked back into 
 the abyss. 
 
 At an interval of about an hour follow- 
 ing the first explosion there had come a 
 second but less violent one; and again two 
 
EXPLOSIONS 137 
 
 hours later, when the mine had sucked 
 back sufficient air to form another explo- 
 sive mixture, a sudden hissing puff again 
 shot out from the shaft, breaking into 
 three pieces two twelve by fourteen green 
 oak beams that we had laid across its 
 mouth as the foundation for a seal. So 
 sudden was the explosion that Peter Daw- 
 son, a powerful Negro who was crawling 
 out over one of the beams when it occurred, 
 was blown a distance of over fifty feet. 
 We found him lying beside the track be- 
 yond a string of box-cars, with the blood 
 running from a bad scalp- wound. His first 
 words were that he had been tossed com- 
 pletely over the cars. " I seen the roofs all 
 white with frost an' moonlight," he mut- 
 tered; and the doctor later affirmed that 
 Pete would have been killed when he 
 landed on the rail if he had not hit on his 
 head. A hundred men were now working 
 
138 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 in the moonlight, and in half an hour two 
 more of the great beams were placed 
 across the shaft-mouth, and planks and 
 canvas, packed down with clay, above them. 
 The damage at the top of the man-hoist 
 had been slight, and only the doors on the 
 house above it had been blown from their 
 fastenings. For the third time the shafts 
 were sealed. 
 
ROB CAKR 
 
 IN the days that followed the explosion 
 there came to all the men the uncon- 
 scious realization that the next attempt to 
 open the mine would in all probability be 
 the last. If the attempt should prove suc- 
 cessful, a few months' time might see the 
 mine again in working order; but should 
 another disaster occur, the mine now 
 partially ruined would probably be 
 wrecked beyond any immediate recovery. 
 As there had been no trace of smoke fol- 
 lowing the explosion, and as the mine had 
 been so promptly sealed, it was reasonable 
 to suppose that little, if any, fire existed 
 in the workings; and the only question 
 was, how much of the work of restoration 
 
140 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 that had been effected was destroyed by 
 the explosion of the gas? 
 
 Ten days later, the helmet-men again 
 were lowered into the mine, and, after re- 
 maining underground for an hour and a 
 half, came out and reported that the force 
 of the explosion had expended itself prin- 
 cipally up the air-shaft, and that although 
 the numerous stoppings that we had erected 
 had been for the most part destroyed there 
 were no serious "falls" that they could 
 discover, or any special damage to the 
 entries which they had explored. Imme- 
 diately the work of restoration began 
 afresh, and all day and night the helmet- 
 men in regular shifts entered the gas-filled 
 mine, and put back in place the stoppings 
 around the mine-bottom, in order to create 
 once more an air-zone for the workers. The 
 work was dangerous. Again we lost a man, 
 an enormous Negro, who had in some way 
 
ROB CARR 141 
 
 loosened his helmet and fallen unconscious, 
 too far from the foot of the hoisting-shaft 
 for his comrades to drag him to the hoist; 
 before the rescue party, consisting of three 
 more helmet-men, had reached him, he was 
 dead. And during these more recent days, 
 another miner had met his death in the 
 blackness of the entry. The pressure of 
 the pneumatic washer beneath the helmet 
 had stopped the circulation around the top 
 of his head, and in endeavoring to loosen 
 his helmet and relieve the pain, he had let 
 in a breath of the gas. We got him to the 
 surface with his heart still faintly beating, 
 but death soon followed. 
 
 The men used to get into their helmets 
 in a little room that we had fitted up for 
 the purpose in the warehouse, one hundred 
 feet from the top of the hoisting-shaft; 
 and as we saw the doors close behind the 
 men as they entered the hoist, every man 
 
142 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 of us would instinctively look at his watch 
 and mark the time of the entrance of the 
 shift. An hour later, some one was sure to 
 remark, "They've been gone an hour 
 just"; and then, a little later, " They 're 
 down an hour and ten minutes." It was 
 then reasonable to expect their signal to 
 the hoisting engineer at any minute. An 
 hour and twenty minutes, or often thirty, 
 would sometimes pass before the little bell 
 in the engine-house rang its " hoist away." 
 If it were an hour and a half, some one 
 would say, " They ought to be out by now " ; 
 and Billy Tilden, who had charge of the 
 helmets, would silently begin getting ready 
 a second set. It was a terrible feeling that 
 would come over us as we watched the 
 minutes slip past the time when the men 
 should appear; and it was a thought that 
 had come to us all, that Charley one day 
 voiced: "Times like this, I'd rather be 
 
r 
 
 ROB CARR 143 
 
 down with ? em than safe on top and all 
 scareful." 
 
 " They are coming out ! " some one would 
 yell from the door of the hoisting engin- 
 eer's house ; and then the strain would 
 become intense. An hour and a half or an 
 hour and three quarters down was a long 
 trip, and if it were the latter, the question 
 would arise silently in every one's thoughts, 
 " How many will appear ? " 
 
 Four always went down on a shift, and 
 twice I remember when the door of the 
 gas-lock above the hoisting-shaft burst 
 open, and but three helmeted men stag- 
 gered out into the sunlight. As the first 
 man's helmet was loosened, a dozen ques- 
 tions were fired at him. Whom had they 
 left ? Where was he ? And while they were 
 talking, the second shift was already on 
 the hoist to the rescue. 
 
 After three weeks it seemed that sue- 
 
144 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 cess would reward us. An air-zone was 
 created between the two shafts, and hel- 
 mets were practically discarded except 
 for exploration into the more distant work- 
 ings of the mine. From the north end of 
 B entry the air-current had been directed 
 into the West North portion of the mine, 
 and that entire section had been cleared 
 of the gas. There had been no fire here, 
 nor had the effects of the explosion been 
 felt, and it was like walking the streets 
 of a silent and long-deserted city to ex- 
 plore these entries so hastily abandoned 
 on the night of the fire four months be- 
 fore. Day and night, like the skirmish line 
 of an army, the men in charge moved 
 slowly from place to place at the edge of 
 the air-zone, each day penetrating farther 
 and farther from the foot of the man-hoist 
 as the air-currents drove back the gas, 
 and forced it up and out through the shaft; 
 
ROB CARR 145 
 
 and with these men ever on ceaseless 
 guard, gangs of miners attacked the great 
 falls in B entry, and carried on the slow 
 work of removing the piles of fallen stone, 
 and retimbering and strengthening the 
 weakened roof. 
 
 I went on at three o'clock, on a shift 
 that lasted until eleven in the evening, 
 and for those eight hours my chief work 
 consisted in testing and marking the line 
 where the life-supporting air ceased, and 
 the invisible, tasteless, odorless gas began. 
 Holding our safety-lamps in the right hand, 
 level with the eyes when we suspected 
 the presence of gas, we would watch the 
 flame. The safety-lamp a heavy, metal, 
 lantern-shaped object, with a circular globe 
 of heavy plate glass is the only light 
 other than electricity that can be safely 
 carried into a gaseous mine. The lamps 
 were lit before they were brought into 
 
146 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 the mine, and in addition were securely 
 locked, that no accident or ignorant in- 
 tention might expose the open flame to 
 the gases of the mine. Over the small, 
 sooty, yellow flame which gives a light 
 less bright than that of an ordinary candle, 
 are two wire-gauze cones fitting snugly 
 inside the heavy globe; and it is through 
 these cones that the flame draws the air 
 which supports it. The presence of black- 
 damp, or carbon dioxide, can easily be 
 detected, if not by its odor, by the action 
 of the flame, which grows dim, and, if the 
 black-damp exists in any quantity, is finally 
 extinguished. 
 
 White-damp, the highly explosive gas 
 which is most feared, has, on the other 
 hand, a totally different effect. In the 
 presence of this gas the flame of the safety- 
 lamp becomes pointed, and as the gas 
 grows stronger, the flame seems tp sepa- 
 
ROB CARR 147 
 
 rate from the wick, and an almost invisible 
 blue cone forms beneath it. If the miner 
 continues to advance into the white-damp, 
 he will pass through a line where there 
 are nine parts of air to one part gas (the 
 explosive mixture), and the lamp will in- 
 stantly register this explosive condition 
 by a sudden crackling inside of the gauze 
 and the extinguishing of the flame. Were 
 it an open lamp, the explosion ignited by 
 the flame would sweep throughout the 
 entire workings, carrying death and de- 
 struction before it; but by the construction 
 of the safety-lamp, the explosion confines 
 itself to the limited area within the gauze 
 cones, and unless the lamp is moved sud- 
 denly and the flame is dragged through 
 the gauze at the instant that the explosion 
 occurs within the globe, it will not extend 
 beyond the gauze. So dim was the light 
 given from these lamps that we usually 
 
148 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 carried a portable electric lamp for light, 
 using our safety-lamps principally for de- 
 tecting the presence of gas. 
 
 As the days went by, the men became 
 more hopeful, and it seemed that we were 
 winning in our fight against the invisible. 
 Already an entire quarter of the mine had 
 been recovered from the gas, a section 
 where men might work without the use 
 of helmets, restoring the burned and blown- 
 down timbering, doors, and brattices. 
 
 Eob Carr, assistant mine-manager, was 
 a tall young Scotsman who had been but 
 a year or two in America. He had been 
 brought up from early boyhood in the 
 coal-mines, and had won the confidence 
 of all who knew him, on account of his 
 knowledge of the difficulties which beset 
 the miner, and his ability in overcoming 
 them. He was a tall man, about six feet 
 two in height, with slightly stooping 
 
ROB CARR 149 
 
 shoulders, caused perhaps by the attitude 
 which days and nights of work under the 
 low roofs of the mine-tunnels made neces- 
 sary. I never heard him swear, and the 
 men who knew him maintained that he 
 never drank or smoked; and yet, in that 
 rude community, where virtues were often 
 more criticised than faults, there was no 
 man more respected and, perhaps, loved 
 than he. 
 
 He joined me every afternoon in the 
 scale-house at about five, and for four 
 hours we followed the long west entries 
 out to their headings, testing for gas, and 
 confirming the safety of the men who 
 worked at bottom and trusted their lives 
 in our hands. Each day he joined me, and 
 for the last hours of my shift we remained 
 together, examining and marking every- 
 where the progress of the air, and the 
 ever-widening boundaries of the air-zone. 
 
150 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 At eleven our shift left the mine, and the 
 night shift, under Carr, went down; and 
 it was in order that he might be fully in- 
 formed as to the conditions underground 
 before he entered the mine with his men 
 that he spent these additional hours in the 
 evening with the men of the shift which 
 preceded him. 
 
 One day we had walked from the scale- 
 house down Second West North to the 
 brattice-door which separates that entry 
 from two other entries which cross it at 
 right angles a half-mile from the mine- 
 bottom. It was our purpose to open this 
 door slightly and start the clean air-cur- 
 rent behind us, moving through it into 
 the crossing entries, which were filled with 
 gas. A temporary brattice had to be erected 
 in the nearer of the cross-entries, and for 
 an hour we sat on the track while the air 
 hummed through the half-open door, until 
 
ROB CARR 151 
 
 the gas had been sufficiently blown back 
 to permit us to pass through and put up 
 the stopping. 
 
 As we sat on the track, talking in the 
 low voice that men always use in dark and 
 quiet places, we remarked how like the 
 sound of surf on a hard beach and a wind 
 from the sea was the sound of the air-cur- 
 rent as it murmured through the cracks 
 in the brattice-door. For the first time, 
 Carr told me of his wife and the two small 
 children whom he had left in Scotland, to 
 whom he would some day return. " And 
 I 'm going to quit mining then," he told 
 me. " I J m going to build a cottage down 
 somewhere along a cove that I know of; 
 where you can hear the surf on the beach, 
 and where you can keep a sail-boat." He 
 had made good, he felt. There was money 
 in the bank that, with the additions of a 
 year or two more, would give him all that 
 
152 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 he desired, and then he was going home. 
 And so we talked and, later, tested and 
 found that the air was clear at last in a 
 little area beyond the door. We erected 
 the stopping, and, waiting a few minutes 
 more to measure with our lamps the speed 
 of the retreating gas, we turned and 
 walked down the track. It was about ten 
 o'clock. In an hour more I would be out, 
 the long, hard day would be over; and 
 then Carr with his night shift would re- 
 turn into the mine, and take up the work 
 where we had left it. 
 
 There were lights and voices in B entry 
 at the mine-bottom, and now and then a 
 bit of laughter; and there was a cheerful 
 noise of sledges and the rumble of the 
 wheels of the flat cars as the men pushed 
 them, laden with the broken stone from 
 the falls, down the track to the hoisting- 
 shaft. A little before eleven, the orders 
 
ROB CARR 153 
 
 were given and the men laid down their 
 tools, and picked up their safety-lamps, to 
 leave. Two decks on the great hoisting- 
 cage carried us all, and a minute later we 
 stepped out into the fresh, cold air of the 
 winter night. 
 
 From the yellow windows and open 
 door of the warehouse came the sounds 
 of voices and the laughter of the night 
 shift who were getting ready to go down. 
 We ; tramped in through the open door, 
 blackened and wet, and for a few minutes 
 rested our tired bodies, and warmed our- 
 selves in the pungent heat of the little 
 room, telling the others what we had ac- 
 complished. As I left the warehouse, I 
 stopped for a minute on the doorstep and 
 took a match from Johnny Ferguson, 
 another Scotsman, a strong, silent man, 
 with friendly eyes ; then turned and walked 
 home in the darkness of the cloudy night. 
 
XI 
 
 THE TRAGEDY OF THE MINE 
 
 IT was about half an hour later when 
 I reached my room, for I had stopped 
 on the way to chat with the gate-man. I 
 was sitting on the edge of the bed, loosen- 
 ing the heel of one of my rubber boots 
 with the toe of the other, when suddenly, 
 through the stillness of the sleeping town, 
 from the power-house half a mile away 
 came a low and rising note, the great siren 
 whistle in the power-house. Almost fas- 
 cinated, I listened as the great note rose 
 higher and more shrill and died away 
 again. One blast meant a fire in the town; 
 two blasts, fire in the buildings at the mine ; 
 and three blasts, the most terrible of all, 
 a disaster or trouble in the mine. Once 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF THE MINE 155 
 
 more, after an interminable pause, the 
 sound came again; and once more rose 
 and died away. I didj not move, but there 
 was a sudden coldness that came over me 
 as once more, for the third time, the deep 
 note broke out on the quiet air. Almost 
 instantaneously the loud jingle of my tele- 
 phone brought me to my feet. I took 
 down the receiver : " The mine 's blown 
 up," said a woman's voice. 
 
 It was half a mile between my room 
 and the gate to the mine-yards, and as my 
 feet beat noisily on the long, straight 
 road, doors opened, yellow against the 
 blackness of the night, and voices called 
 out women's voices mostly. 
 
 The gate-man knew little. " She 's let 
 go," was all that he could say. 
 
 There were two men at the fan-house, 
 the fan-engineer and his assistant, and in 
 a second I learned from them that there 
 
156 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 had come a sudden puff up the air-shaft 
 that had 'spun the fan backward a dozen 
 revolutions on the belt before it picked 
 up again. The explosion doors, built for 
 such an emergency on the new dome 
 above the air-shaft, had banged open 
 noisily and shut again of their own weight. 
 That was all. 
 
 There were half a dozen men at the top 
 of the hoisting-shaft. The hoisting en- 
 gineer sat, white-faced, on his seat by the 
 shaft-mouth, one arm laid limply on the 
 window-sill, his hand clenched on the 
 lever. " I tried to telephone 'em," he said, 
 "but they didn't answer. The cage was 
 down. She came out with a puff like you 
 blow out of your pipe; that's all." He 
 stopped and awkwardly wiped his face. 
 " Then I left the hoist down five minutes 
 and brought her up," he continued, " but 
 there was no one in it. Then I sent it 
 down again. It 's down there now." 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF THE MINE 157 
 
 " How long has it been down? " I asked. 
 
 " Ten minutes/' he hazarded. 
 
 I gave him the order to hoist; and the 
 silence was suddenly broken by the grind 
 of the drums as he pulled the lever back, 
 and the cable began to wind slowly up- 
 ward. A minute later the black top of the 
 hoist pushed up from the hole, and the 
 decks, one by one, appeared all empty. 
 
 There was no one at the mine except 
 the hoisting engineer and some of the 
 night force who were on duty at the 
 power-house and in the engine-room. In 
 the long months of trouble our force had 
 gradually diminished, and of those who 
 had remained and who were equal to such 
 an emergency, part were now in the mine, 
 and the rest, worn out and exhausted by 
 the long day's work, were far away in the 
 town, asleep; or perhaps, if the whistle 
 had aroused them, on their way to the 
 
158 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 mine. Instant action was necessary, for 
 following an explosion comes the after- 
 damp, and if any were living this poison- 
 ous gas would destroy them. 
 
 As I turned from the shaft-mouth, Mc- 
 Pherson, the superintendent, a square- 
 built, freckled Scotsman about fifty years 
 of age, came running toward the ware- 
 house. There were but two helmets ready, 
 for so favorably had our work progressed 
 that we had neglected to keep more than 
 two charged with oxygen, and had allowed 
 the rest to be taken apart for repairs. 
 Familiar with the conditions existing in 
 the mine, we realized that the explosion, 
 however slight, must have blown down 
 many of the stoppings which we had 
 erected, and allowed the pent-up gas to 
 rush back into the portion of the mine 
 which we had recovered, and in which 
 the night shift was now imprisoned. If 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF THE MINE 159 
 
 the gas had been ignited by open fire, 
 immediate action was necessary, for our 
 own safety as well as for the chance of 
 rescuing the men in the mine ; for in the 
 month preceding we had seen the mine 
 "repeat" at regular intervals with two 
 explosions, and if the fire had been ignited 
 from open flame we must enter it, effect 
 the rescue of our comrades, and escape 
 before we could be caught by a second 
 explosion. On the other hand, the chances 
 were equal that the explosion might have 
 been set off by a defective gauze in a 
 safety-lamp or some other cause, and that 
 there would be no immediate explosion 
 following the first one. 
 
 In the hurry of adjusting our helmets, 
 no one noticed that the charge of oxygen 
 in mine was short, and that an hour and 
 forty minutes was my working limit; and 
 all unconscious of this, I tightened the 
 
160 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 valve, and with the oxygen hissing in the 
 check-valves, we left the bright light of 
 the room, and felt our way down the steps 
 into the darkness of the yard, where a 
 great arc-light above the hoisting-shaft 
 made objects visible in its lavender light. 
 A crowd had already gathered; a dark, 
 silent crowd that stood like a flock of 
 frightened sheep around the mouth of the 
 man-hoist. With a man on either side of 
 us to direct us, we walked to the hoist, 
 our electric hand-lanterns throwing long 
 white beams of light before us. There was 
 no sound; no shrieking of women, no 
 struggling of frenzied mothers or sisters 
 to fight their way into the mine ; but there 
 was a more awful silence, and as we passed 
 a pile of ties, I heard a whimpering noise, 
 like a puppy, and in the light of my lamp 
 saw the doubled form of a woman who 
 crouched alone on the ground, a shawl 
 drawn over her head, sobbing. 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF THE MINE 161 
 
 We stepped on the hoist, and for an 
 instant there came the picture of a solid 
 line of people who hung on the edge of 
 the light; of white faces; of the lavender 
 glare of the arc-lamp, contrasting with 
 the orange light from the little square 
 window in the house of the hoisting engin- 
 eer. "Are you ready?" he called to us. 
 "Let her go," we said; and the picture 
 was gone as the hoist sank into the black- 
 ness of the shaft. "We said nothing as we 
 were lowered, for we knew where the 
 men would be if we could reach them, and 
 there was nothing else to talk about. The 
 grind of the shoes of the hoist as they 
 scraped the rails made a sound that 
 drowned out my feeble whistling of the 
 " Merry Widow " waltz inside of my helmet. 
 
 We felt the motion of our descent 
 slacken, and then came a sudden roaring 
 splash as the lower deck of the hoist hit 
 
X 
 
 162 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 the water which filled the sump. Slowly 
 we sank down until the water which 
 flooded that part of the mine rose, cold 
 and dead, to our knees, and the hoist 
 came to a stop. Splashing clumsily over 
 the uneven floor, we climbed the two 
 steps which led to the higher level of B 
 entry, and for a minute turned the white 
 beams of our lights hi every direction. 
 There was nothing to be seen, and no 
 trace of any explosion except a thin, white 
 layer of dead mist or smoke which hung 
 lifeless, like cigar-smoke in a quiet room, 
 about four feet from the ground; but 
 there was a silence that was terrible, for 
 in it we listened in vain for the voices of 
 men. At first we assured ourselves that 
 there was no one around the bottom of 
 the shaft, for we had expected that some 
 one, injured by the explosion, might have 
 been able to crawl toward the man-hoist; 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF THE MINE 163 
 
 but there was no trace of any human be- 
 ing- 
 Walking slowly and peering before us 
 through the bull's-eyes of our helmets, to 
 right and left, we advanced down the en- 
 try, our lights cutting the blackness like 
 the white fingers of twin searchlights. 
 Suddenly, far off in the darkness, there 
 came a sound. It was laughter. We 
 stopped and listened. High, shrill, and 
 mad the notes caught our ears. Again we 
 advanced, and the laughter broke into a 
 high, shrill song. To right and left we 
 swung the bars of our searchlights, feel- 
 ing for the voice. Suddenly the white 
 light brought out of the darkness a 
 tangled mass of blackened timbers which 
 seemed to fill the entry, and into the light 
 from the pile of wreckage staggered the 
 figure of a man, his clothes hanging in 
 sooty ribbons, and his face and body 
 
164 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 blackened beyond recognition. Only the 
 whites of his eyes seemed to mark him 
 from the wreckage which surrounded 
 him. In a high-pitched voice he called to 
 us, and we knew that he was mad. " Come ! 
 Come ! " he cried. "Let 's get out of here. 
 Come on, boys! Let's go somewhere"; 
 and then, as his arms instinctively caught 
 our necks, and we felt for his waist, he 
 began talking to Jesus. With our sway- 
 ing burden, we turned and retraced our 
 steps down the entry, and fifteen minutes 
 after our descent into the mine, we handed 
 out of the hoist the first man rescued, to 
 his friends. 
 
 Once more came the vision of the great 
 black wall of people in the lights at the 
 mine-mouth, and again we plunged down 
 into the blackness and silence of the mine. 
 Reaching bottom, we walked as rapidly 
 as we were able beyond the point where 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF THE MINE 165 
 
 we had found the madman, to where the 
 great structure of the scale-house had 
 once filled a cross-cut between B entry 
 and the air-course behind it. Where once 
 had been solid timbers and the steel struc- 
 ture of the scales, now remained nothing 
 but the bare walls of the cross-cut, swept 
 clean by a giant force, and in the en- 
 try the crumbled and twisted wreckage 
 marked where the force of the explosion 
 had dropped it in its course. With a swing 
 of my light I swept the floor of the cross- 
 cut. Half-way down it, on the floor, lay 
 what seemed to be a long bundle of rags. 
 I knew it was a man. There was no move- 
 ment as I walked toward it, and as I knelt 
 over it a sudden impulse came to me to 
 disbelieve my first thought that this could 
 be a man. Prevented from seeing clearly 
 by the bull's-eye of my helmet, and the 
 poor light of my electric lamp, I felt for 
 
166 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 his chest, and as my hand touched his 
 breast, I felt that it was warm and wet. 
 Perhaps he was alive. I ran my light 
 along the bundle. Those were his feet. I 
 turned it the other way. The man was 
 headless. Instantly I got to my feet, and 
 in the faint glimmer of McPherson's light 
 I saw that he had found something in the 
 wreckage. ""What is it?" I bellowed to 
 him through my helmet. He pointed with 
 his ray of light. A body hung in the mass 
 of wreckage, thrown into it like putty 
 against a screen. "We turned and contin- 
 ued our way up the entry. 
 
 Halfway between the shafts there was 
 a temporary canvas stopping, and we 
 knew that if we could tear this down, the 
 air from the fan which had been speeded 
 up must short-circuit, and pass through 
 B entry, clearing out the after-damp be- 
 fore it. Most of the men, if not all, would 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF THE MINE 167 
 
 be in this entry ; of that we were confident. 
 By tearing down the brattice and thus 
 changing the direction of the ventilation, 
 life might be saved. 
 
 As I have said, I had entered the mine 
 on my first trip with a short charge of oxy- 
 gen, and in the urgency had failed to re- 
 plenish it before going down the second 
 time. As I turned from the cross-cut a 
 sudden tugging at my lungs told me that 
 my air was running low. Beside the track, 
 in a pool of water, lay a blackened object 
 that I knew to be a man. He was the only 
 one I recognized, and I knew that it must 
 be Daman, one of the gas-inspectors, 
 the body was so small. A few feet beyond 
 him lay another, and another, all blackened 
 and unrecognizable. The white wall of 
 the brattice gleamed suddenly before us, 
 and in a second we had torn it from its 
 fastenings. One side had already disap- 
 
168 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 peared from the force of the explosion. 
 "Why it was not all torn to ribbons, I do 
 not know. 
 
 As I turned, I called to McPherson that 
 I was in, and as I spoke a sudden black- 
 ness engulfed me. My air was gone. The 
 sights of that awful night and the long 
 strain of the months of dangerous work 
 on high-strung nerves had caught me. I 
 came to with my eyes closed, and a clean, 
 sweet taste of fresh air in my mouth. I 
 thought I was above ground, but opening 
 my eyes I saw that I was looking through 
 the bull's-eye of my helmet at a blackened 
 roof, dim in the single shaft of a lamp. 
 McPherson was talking to me. He had 
 dragged me from [where I lay to where 
 he had felt the air blow strongest. My 
 weight, increased by the forty-five pounds 
 of the helmet, made it impossible for him 
 to think of moving me unaided. There 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF THE MINE 169 
 
 was no time to summon assistance. In the 
 strong current of air, he had opened my 
 valves and trusted that, revived by the 
 fresh air, I could reach the hoisting-shaft 
 under my own locomotion before the after- 
 damp could overcome me. Faint and reel- 
 ing, I got to my feet; we started down 
 the entry, our arms about each other's 
 necks. We were both staggering, and 
 halfway to the sump I fell. Then we 
 crawled and rested and crawled again. 
 I think I remember splashing in the water 
 at the foot of the hoisting-shaft, but no- 
 thing more. Out of the twenty-seven men 
 who had entered the mine we had found 
 but one alive. 
 
 In the long night that followed about 
 twenty of the bodies were removed from 
 the mine, for the fan soon cleared the gas 
 from the main entry, where most of the 
 men had been when the explosion occurred. 
 
170 A YEAR IN A COAL-MINE 
 
 At dawn a faint tinge of fresh wood-smoke 
 in the air that poured from the man-hoist 
 suggested that a fire had started up some- 
 where in the workings, and as this might 
 cause another explosion, the work of re- 
 moving the bodies was for the time aban- 
 doned and the shafts were sealed. 
 
 Two weeks later a final attempt was 
 made to recover the bodies which still re- 
 mained in the mine, and fourteen men 
 were engaged hi the work, when a sharp 
 explosion occurred. The majority reached 
 the top, bringing with them two of their 
 companions, who died within a few hours, 
 but they left behind them near the foot of 
 the man-hoist the bodies of three others. 
 
 With this disaster the mine was aban- 
 doned, the little town became soon de- 
 serted, and for a year and more the great 
 seals on the shafts remained unbroken. 
 To-day the mine is once more in opera- 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF THE MINE 171 
 
 tion, for a new company obtained the 
 property and after months of almost hope- 
 less struggle succeeded in restoring it to 
 a working condition. 
 
 Sometimes I think that I would like to 
 go back and see once more the big black 
 tipple that guards the shaft-mouth and 
 perhaps go down to B entry and watch 
 the trains come in, and then I think of 
 faces I would look for, faces that would 
 not be there. 
 
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
 U . S . A 
 
TRUE THRILLING TALES 
 
 Adrift on an Ice-Pan 
 
 By WILFRED T. GRENFELL 
 
 " The adventure, as romantic as anything in fiction, is narrated 
 with great charm and with characteristic modesty. The doctor's 
 sensations when he found himself face to face with death are 
 of singular interest, and his description of the conduct of his 
 faithful dogs is pathetic in the extreme. It is a book to warm 
 one's heart." Boston Globe. 
 
 Illustrated from Photographs 
 Narrow I2mo, 75 cents net. Postpaid 83 cents 
 
 Stickeen : The Story of a Dog 
 
 By JOHN MUIR 
 
 " There have been no end of dog stories of power and interest, 
 but this is not a work of fiction ; it is the interested study and 
 appreciation of a strange little animal, by one who is not inclined 
 to be sentimental in his views. . . . The record is told with such 
 simplicity and force that it may easily become a classic among 
 books dealing with nature studies." St. Louis Globe-Democrat. 
 
 Narrow I2mo, 60 cents net. Postpaid 68 cents 
 
 HOUGHTON /\^" BOSTON 
 
 MIFFLIN 1^^ AND 
 
 COMPANY ralEl NEW YORK 
 
HUMAN BULLETS 
 
 By TADAYOSHI SAKURAI 
 
 " ' Human Bullets ' is the most remarkable book, in a 
 literary and psychological way, brought out through the 
 war clash of Russia and Japan. It is the revelation at 
 once of the soul of a soldier and the moving spirit of a 
 people." New York World. 
 
 " The book as a whole is a singular and strikingly valuable 
 work, not only by reason of its vivid descriptions of the 
 stern side of war, but for its revelation of Japanese ideals 
 of patriotism and military duty." Brooklyn Eagle. 
 
 " The story is told simply, but with such a touch of realism 
 that his word-pictures are distinctly picturesque. . . . The 
 author has shown rare literary skill, and the translator and 
 editor have not permitted the narrative to lose anything 
 of technical value." Transcript, Boston. 
 
 " It is an illuminating exposition of the Japanese mind, in 
 war and in peace. . . . The book furnishes a striking 
 picture of what war actually is, even under its most 
 humane aspects." Bookman, N. Y. 
 
 With frontispiece in color by the author 
 
 i2mo, $1.25 net. Postpaid $1.37 
 
 HOUGHTON />'' BOSTON 
 
 MIFFLIN j3\W AND 
 
 COMPANY rara NEW YORK 
 
THE CONFESSIONS OF A 
 RAILROAD SIGNALMAN 
 
 By J. O. PAGAN 
 
 " Extremely well written and forcible." The Outlook. 
 
 " A terrible indictment of our railway management." 
 New York Post. 
 
 " The literature of the day contains few things more 
 interesting than these confessions. They relate to rail- 
 road accidents, and the confessor is manifestly a man 
 not only of remarkable discernment, but likewise of 
 rhetorical skill." Stone and Webster Public Service 
 Journal. 
 
 "Throws much light on the frequency of railroad 
 accidents and will stimulate serious thought on the 
 part of readers." Troy Times. 
 
 "Remarkable and interesting." Boston Herald. 
 
 Illustrated from photographs. I2mo, $1.00 net. 
 
 Postage 10 cents. 
 
 HOUGHTON /\5' BOSTON 
 
 MIFFLIN /ofeT AND 
 
 COMPANY C^lra NEW YORK 
 
BOOKS BY ANDY ADAMS 
 
 " Mr. Adams's books are a unique contribution to the 
 history of the country." Boston Transcript. 
 
 REED ANTHONY, COWMAN 
 
 The autobiography of a cowboy, giving an interesting 
 insight into the old-time cattle business. 
 
 THE LOG OF A COWBOY 
 
 " Breezy, natural, entertaining and racy of the soil." 
 
 Chicago Record-Herald. 
 Illustrated by E. BOYD SMITH. 
 
 A TEXAS MATCHMAKER 
 
 " A rattling good story, full of fun and the spirit of out- 
 of-doors." San Francisco Argonaut. 
 Illustrated by E. BOYD SMITH. 
 
 THE OUTLET 
 
 "A splendid description of a cattle-drive, vivid and 
 well written." New York Life. 
 
 Illustrated by E. BOYD SMITH. 
 
 CATTLE BRANDS 
 
 " Clever, original and highly amusing tales." 
 
 Boston Transcript. 
 Each of the above, $1.50. 
 
 HOUGHTON /\| BOSTON 
 
 MIFFLIN /^\f< AND 
 
 COMPANY fWipg NEW YORK 
 
HEROES OF THE STORM 
 
 By WILLIAM D. O'CONNOR 
 
 WONDERFULLY graphic accounts of the 
 most famous rescues from shipwreck by the 
 crews of the U. S. Life-Saving Service. O'Connor 
 was a master in writing of the sea and its perils. 
 
 "That his style was strong and smooth is shown by 
 these descriptions of wrecks which undoubtedly are 
 correct in every detail. The unflagging zeal and 
 striking heroism of the life savers clearly is demon- 
 strated, and a new emphasis is given to the perils of 
 life on the ocean wave." 
 
 Boston Transcript. 
 
 With introduction by Superintendent S. I. 
 KIMBALL I2mo, $1.50 
 
 ^x;ftrfrw^? 
 
 HOUGHTON /^ BOSTON 
 
 MIFFLIN /^\W AND 
 
 COMPANY &^ NEW YORK 
 
A MAN'S MAN 
 
 By IAN HAY 
 
 "An admirable romance of adventure. It tells of the 
 life of one Hughie Marrable, who, from college days to 
 the time when fate relented, had no luck with women. 
 The story is cleverly written and full ol sprightly 
 axioms." Philadelphia Ledger. 
 
 " It is a very joyous book, and the writer's powers of 
 characterization are much out of the common." The 
 
 Dial. 
 
 "A good, clean, straightforward bit of fiction, with 
 likable people in it, and enough action to keep up the 
 suspense throughout." Minneapolis Journal. 
 
 "The reader will search contemporary fiction far be- 
 fore he meets a novel which will give him the same 
 frank pleasure and amusement." London Bookman. 
 
 With frontispiece. i2mo, $1.20 net. Postage 10 cents. 
 
 HOUGHTON BOSTON 
 
 MIFFLIN 
 COMPANY ra NEW YORK 
 
QF CALIFORNIA LIBRAE 
 
 
 HOME USE 
 
 CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT 
 MAIN LIBRARY 
 
 This book is due on the last date stamped below. 
 1 -month loans may be renewed by calling 642-3405. 
 6-month loans may be recharged by bringing books 
 
 to Circulation Desk. 
 Renewals and recharges may be made 4 days prior 
 
 to due date. 
 
 ALL BOOKS ARE SUBJECT TO RECALL 7 DAYS 
 AFTER DATE CHECKED OUT. 
 
 12 
 
 KEC.C/R. D 4 
 
 1978 
 
 ^i I r\ f\. ^rt/\_ 
 
 
 * 3 7987 
 
 
 RET'D MAR 3 1981 
 
 JAN 3 2002 
 
 
 
YB 15544 
 
 f