That was evident enough. Everywhere about them the black walls were dripping with moisture, and every angle shone bright in the rays of their lamps. From low roof and sides alike gleamed thousands of scintillating points, until it seemed almost that they must be in a mine of diamonds. Along the center of the gangway a row of heavy props had been placed to support the roof and render it quite safe. As they went on, Bessie Andrews began to think it all some dreadful illusion. Mules loomed up suddenly before her; swarthy faces, with no apparent bodies, gleamed for an instant out of the darkness; a constant rumble of cars was in her ears; the lamps sputtered and flared in the strong air-current, and seemed each instant about to go out and leave them in darkness—such a darkness as exists nowhere else. On they went,—miles, as it seemed to her, but really only a few hundred yards,—and came at last to a door, beside which a small boy sat. He jumped up and opened it for them, and they passed through. For a moment they walked on between two narrow walls which opened suddenly before them.
“Now we are in a chamber,” said her guide. “Here we will see the miners at work.”
Far ahead she could see dimly four lights bobbing about in a seemingly senseless way. Suddenly three of them came toward her; she heard somewhere in the distance the cry of “Fire!” repeated over and over. The three lights disappeared; the fourth drew rapidly near, then disappeared also. She felt Lambert catch her by the arm to steady her; there was a sudden beating of the air against her face, the dull rumble of an explosion, the crash of falling coal, and then a moment’s breathless silence.
CHAPTER VII
THE GOOD WORLD!
“It was only a blast,” said Lambert, smiling down into the white face his flickering lamp disclosed to him. “Let us go up to the face of the room and see it.”
The four lights ahead had reappeared again and were bobbing about distractedly, and as they went forward toward them through a cloud of acrid smoke, she saw two men rapidly filling a mine car, while the other two were busy setting a new prop under the roof. These last two were the master-miners, her guide told her, and she watched them with interest while they set a post of hard wood upright and secured it in place by driving a broad wedge between it and the roof.
“That big wedge gives the post more purchase on the roof, you know,” Lambert explained. “See, the car is full; it holds a little over a ton.”
The two laborers pushed it down the track to the foot of the chamber, where a driver-boy would pick it up on his next trip out.
“Every car has a tag on it to show which room it comes from,” went on the superintendent, “and when it gets outside, the coal is weighed and credited to the men who mined it. The men usually work in pairs,—butties, they call them,—and each man has a helper whom he has to pay out of his earnings. That’s the reason so many of the men make their boys work for them.”
The props needed to support the roof were set, the coal brought down by the blast cleared out of the way, the dirt and debris scraped to one side, and the two miners looked carefully over the wall of coal before them and held a little consultation. Then one of them removed his lamp from his cap and lay down on his side, and with a sharp pick began to cut in the coal a deep horizontal groove about a foot above the floor. The other miner lighted him at his work, and when he grew tired, as he soon did because of the strained position, changed places with him.