Some weeks later, Stella Cole had just straightened up from the half-barrel tubs, to wring a soggy batch of towels before "renchin'" them in the clearer water, when she looked up with that uncanny premonition of danger which lower animals and lower races possess. The ground shivered; then a hideous noise broke over the sunned and silent trees, deafening her. The vast growl of the dynamite explosion rang shrilly in her ears; she fell on trembling knees, praying.
The crash of falling timbers behind made her look around. The unsteady ground, she said afterwards, "shook lak you wuz shakin' a counterpane." The rickety step supports crumpled, the rotted square of the back porch crashed in on the bench of water-buckets below.
There was a droning noise in the air, the sound of running steps along the road passing above the house. Toward the farther mines, beyond her house and the next hill, she saw a palpable haze, smoke-like and yet not smoke, dulling the sky.
"Mah boys!" she gasped, and started running puffily for the front gate, and the road beyond.
She stood aside to let a screeching machine throb past her. It was Mr. Pelham; the sight of his tense and collected gaze reassured her. Mr. Pelham wouldn't let anything happen to her boys.
She shrank into the outer fringe of the tear-eyed, wailing Hewintown women, trying desperately to get some news. She wandered twice into the thick air at the top of the ramp, but the acrid heaviness drove her back. The men she spoke to cursed, shoving her aside. She slumped to the ground, moaning in inarticulate misery. Lord, they were all dead!
Then she saw Ed running with an empty bucket, his head bandaged, his face grimed and ferocious. "Ed! Eddie! Whar's Babe, an' Jim, an' Will——"
He stopped, coughing, gasping. "Jim's killed, ma. Dey brung out his body. Hit's yonder under dem trees.... Babe's all right; ain't seed Will. Mebbe he's caved in." He hurried off, face set and purposeful.
"Mah Jim! Mah Jim!" She pulled her trembling body from the ground, and set off on unsteady feet toward the ominous trees.
The body was not there. "You might look in the Company stores, in Hewintown," said a sweet voiced girl, her face torn with sympathy.