Priest was so frightened he began to pray. The boys thought that was quite an incident, seeing a Priest pray on a cable car going after guano, and they always got a bang out of telling it.
That car contributed its share of incidents at the cave. One other time we had just received several hundred empty sacks and were preparing to send them below where the men could fill them with guano.
Generally the workers in the cave would walk the ladders when they wanted to go into the cave or come out. But this time there were three boys who decided they would get a free ride as long as the car was going anyway with the sacks. So they jumped on.
Sitting gaily on the sacks they appeared ready for a thrill, so they called out to the whim man, "Let 'er go!"
He did.
The boys were asking for a fast ride, so he decided to give it to them. He forgot to take into consideration that the weight of the several hundred sacks plus the weight of the three boys was too much for the car, and as it gained momentum in its downward plunge the brake gave way.
The car was now falling freely of its own weight, and in an instant would crash at the bottom, totally wrecking the car and possibly killing the three boys.
I happened to see the whole thing, being right there at the time, and before I could think what was happening I had instinctively grabbed a 4×4 timber close by and rammed it into the whim.
Smoke billowed from the 4×4 as it hit the whim. The car slowed up just as it hit the bottom.
From our position at the top of the shaft we couldn't tell how hard the car had landed, nor could we tell if anyone had been badly hurt.