“But you said the pillars were needed to hold up the roof.”
“They are.”
“Then when you take them out doesn’t the roof fall?”
“It does sometimes,” said Lambert, grimly, “but we do the work as quickly and carefully as we can, and put in a lot of extra posts. It’s dangerous, I admit, but it has to be done, or there wouldn’t be much profit in coal-mining. You see, Miss Bessie, our rooms are only twenty-one feet wide—that’s as wide as it’s safe to make them. Well, if we leave walls twelve feet thick between them, we lose over one third of the coal in the mine. And remember that every ton of this last third can be got out without any additional initial expense—for gangways, tracks, tipple, and so on, you know. We can’t afford to waste all that; if we did, we’d lose our profit and would have to shut up shop.”
She did not answer, but walked along beside him, deep in thought. It seemed such a savage irony that men must risk their lives in order to render the business profitable!
“There is the opening into the old part of the mine,” said Lambert, pointing to a tight door upon which had been painted in great flaming letters.
FIRE!
“Does that mean there’s a fire in there?” she asked.
“Well,” said her guide, “there isn’t any fire there now, but there probably would be—and a big explosion, too—if anybody went through there with a lighted lamp. We blow the place out every once in a while,—the law compels us to,—but in those old workings the fire-damp collects pretty fast.”
“I’ve heard stories about fire-damp ever since I’ve been old enough to read the newspapers,” she said. “What is it, Mr. Lambert?”