CHAPTER XLV.
GHOST-HAUNTED SHAFTS.
Thus far we have seen only such levels, drifts, and cross-cuts as were well-timbered and in perfect order. We will now take a trip through an old upper level, where the ore has all been extracted, and where no trouble is taken to keep the ground up—one of the old upper levels of the Belcher mine, for instance. Here we find about ten acres of worked-out ground which is a regular wilderness.
In this place one sees something of the tremendous weight and pressure of the superincumbent earth. It is a place to make the hair rise erect on the head of any clothes-wearing man who has not been scalped by nature or by art. The large, square timbers are crushed down to half their original height, and are splintered and twisted; chambers originally square are squeezed into a diamond shape, and their roofs almost touch the floor in the centre; solid piles of timber that have been packed into the ground as long as there was room for another stick, are pressed into pancakes; winzes and chutes are “telescoped;” ladder-ways, once spacious, are crushed out of all shape, and now can hardly accommodate a cat—all is confused and shapeless.
This region somewhat resembles the track of a tornado in a timbered country—what is called a “windfall.” In places we enter immense caverns where the timbers are gone, and where huge flakes of clay lean far out from the walls, and composedly look down upon us as we tremblingly glide along underneath. One is afraid to sneeze lest he bring these down upon his head. A smell of mustiness and decay pervades the whole place. The whole level is gradually settling down and squeezing together. There is no danger of the sudden caving of any considerable area of ground, but eventually all the timbers will be pressed into a pancake, and the place will be forever closed.
In these deserted levels the paths are circuitous and uncertain, and in threading the labyrinth of fast-disappearing drifts, galleries, and cross-cuts, one must have a guide who passes through them almost daily.
To those not familiar with mines it may appear strange, but the lower levels—indeed, all of the levels—are alive with rats. The miners never kill or molest them, therefore they become quite tame and saucy. As the miners all carry a lunch with them into the mine, the rats live well on the fragments. These rats are really of service, as they devour the scraps of meat and bones thrown upon the ground, which would in a short time create a bad odor in the mine. The decay of the smallest thing in a mine cannot be endured. Should a rat be killed by any accident it must be sent up out of the mine. Should a small piece of cotton cloth be burned in a drift, the miners would smell it throughout the level, and to burn a small splinter of pine would probably cause serious alarm, if not a grand stampede among them, as they would think there was a fire in the timbers of the mine.
In the old upper levels we find as many rats as in any other place. If we sit down upon a fallen timber and converse for a few minutes they will come about us. They think we are miners sitting down to lunch. They come and sit near us on the ends of the timbers, and cock their heads this way and that, as they look inquiringly about. Evidently they do not at all understand it. Why we should be sitting there talking, with no dinner-pails in sight, seems to puzzle them not a little.
There are frequently rats that are the pets of the men working in a particular part of the mine—a rat known to them by some mark, as his having lost a piece of his tail. To this rat they give some such name as “Bobby,” or “Tommy,” and feed and pet him until he becomes so saucy that he can hardly be kept out of the dinner-pails.
When there is about to be a great cave in a mine, the rats give the miners their first warning. They become very uneasy, and are seen scampering about at unwonted times and in unusual places. The rats first discover that the mine is settling, and they start out in search of a place of safety. It is supposed that in settling, the waste rock and timbers pinch them in their usual holes and haunts, and they are obliged to go forth in search of new quarters, in order to escape being crushed to death. A fire in a mine kills them by thousands. The poisonous gases penetrate to every part of the level, and not a rat is left alive. Sometimes after a fire in a mine they are gathered up on the floors by bushels. In trying to jump across the main shaft, a rat occasionally miscalculates the distance, and falls to the bottom. A rat falling a thousand feet and striking a miner on the head is sure to knock him down. The rat is killed, of course, as he generally explodes wherever he strikes. Dogs are dangerous about a shaft. Some years since, at Gold Hill, a dog fell into a shaft across which he attempted to jump, and killed two men who were at work at its bottom, three hundred feet below the surface.
So many men have been killed in all of the principal mines that there is hardly a mine on the lead that does not contain ghosts, if we are to believe what the miners say.